In David Frankel‘s emotionally cloying Collateral Beauty (Warner Bros. 12.16), Will Smith plays Howard Inlet, a New York ad agency co-owner in a state of acute grief over the cancer death of his young daughter.
Inlet is holding onto grief as a way of keeping his daughter “with” him, in a sense. But he isn’t just engulfed in sadness — his grief is theatrically grandiose, even tedious. There’s a moment when Inlet pedals his bike directly into oncoming Manhattan traffic, and it doesn’t just scream “go ahead, kill me, I don’t care!” — it also announces “this, ladies and gentleman, is what suicidal nihilism looks like in a Hollywood grief movie.”
Initially Inlet’s shutdown is very sad and understandable until you’re told that he’s been living in his grief hole for two years. I bailed on Collateral Beauty after 50 minutes or so, but I emotionally left when I heard Ed Norton‘s Whit Yardsham mention how long his business partner has been under.
There’s no hard and fast rule about grieving (although psychologists have written about how long it tends to last, obviously depending on the circumstances) but there’s a general notion that it can last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, and as much as a year if you’ve really been walloped hard. But two years is too much. It just is. And eff this movie for throwing Will Smith‘s mope-a-dope into my lap.
