Collateral Beauty

David Frankel’s 2016 film follows Howard Inlet, an advertising executive who has barely spoken for months since his daughter died. His partners need him declared unfit so the agency can be sold. Allan Loeb wrote the script on spec. The project began with a different team: in spring 2015 Hugh Jackman led, Rooney Mara opposite him, Alfonso Gomez-Rejón directing. Scheduling pushed Jackman out, Mara left in September, and Gomez-Rejón quit in October; reporting at the time said he felt he was directing a different film from the one he signed for. Frankel came aboard in November and shooting began in New York in February 2016. The ninety-seven minutes do not rest on Howard. Love, Time and Death each confront one of the partners with that partner’s own failure, so the wounds the film closes belong to the people around him. It opened in the United States on 16 December 2016 with 7.1 million dollars. The next year the Golden Raspberries nominated it for Worst Screen Combo as “The Entire Cast of Once Respected Actors”. A good fit if you can take the scheme to have Howard ruled incompetent as an emotional device rather than an ethical question. Not for you if you want his grief kept at the centre instead of parcelled out across three partners’ subplots.