Smith channels personal grief

‘Collateral Beauty’ a drama of parental grief

NEW YORK, Dec 14, (Agencies): Will Smith had already begun researching his role for “Collateral Beauty” when he learned that his father was terminally ill.

Smith said at the film’s world premiere in New York on Monday that he had to channel the emotions of that tragic news into a demanding film role. Smith’s father, Willard Carroll Smith Jr, died on Nov 7.

“My father was diagnosed and given six weeks, so you know, to be hit with that in the process and then what we decided to do was just use the preparation of the character to actually deal with what my father was experiencing,” Smith said. “It became our way of saying goodbye, essentially. It was a really beautiful confluence of art and life.”

Smith stars in the film as a father who suffers a great tragedy and begins to question the point of existence.

“It is such a beautiful concept. It’s a guy that experiences a loss and gets furious at the universe, and writes these letters to Love, Time and Death, and his mind is so twisted that he mails the letters. And then, Love, Time and Death respond. You know, it’s that beautiful Christmas twist to it, but dealing with real issues,” Smith said.

The film also stars Helen Mirren in the role of Death. She admitted to loving the script, and felt it shared the same vibe as Christmas classics like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Carol.”

“There was something very, very true in the center of it. And kind of as a Christmas movie, you know it’s kind of a pretty cool Christmas gift of a movie,” Mirren said.

Edward Norton, who plays Smith’s best friend and partner in the film, also said he saw a strong similarity with the film to holiday

LOS ANGELES:

The list of documentary Oscar winners over the past 60 years has included women filmmakers, demonstrating that while the world of feature narrative classics like “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“They straddle this very difficult balance between, obviously being very heart-winning and heart-warming and hopeful. But if you think about it, they touch on very dark and difficult things. Jimmy Stewart is in such despair he’s going to a bridge to jump, right? But somehow they manage to be about deep and important things, while also being a lot of fun,” Norton said.

“Collateral Beauty” theaters on Dec 16.

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It asks a lot of an audience to sit through a drama about a parent grieving over the loss of a child. The subject is rough — and beyond that, it has a vast potential for programmed pathos and fake sentiment. That’s part of the miracle of “Manchester by the Sea.” It leads us through one man’s life of locked-in sorrow with a sculptured emotional elegance that is never false; at the same time, the cathartic honesty of its journey allows the audience to touch a nerve of desolation and still breathe free. So it’s telling, in a way, that in an awards season that’s been tilting away from major-studio releases and toward independent works like “Manchester,” along comes “Collateral Beauty,” the big soppy whimsical lump-inthe-throat commercial version of a drama of parental grief.

It feels like a Hollywood awards movie from 30 years ago, laced with the kind of four-hankie strategies — hugs, buckets of tears, New Age greeting-card sentiments — that “Manchester” transcended.

By the end of “Collateral Beauty,” you’d have to have a heart of stone for the film not to get to you a bit, but even if it does, you may still feel like you’ve been played.

The movie opens with Will Smith,

films remains much too largely a boys’ club, docs have long been a great place where women contribute, compete and win.

With that glass ceiling thankfully long in vintage Will Smith mode — brash, ageless, a superhero of confidence — giving a pep talk to the New York advertising agency he owns and presides over, but then, moments later, the image of Smith literally melts three years ahead. Smith’s Howard, now haggard and morose, with thinning gray hair, has stopped talking to anyone. The closest he comes to a constructive activity is setting up intricate arrays of multi-colored dominoes in his office, which he then lets topple as if to demonstrate an existential law: Whatever you create is destined to come falling down.

Howard, we learn, lost his sixyear-old daughter to cancer, and the agony imprisons and consumes him daily. He rides his bike against the New York traffic. He writes letters — not to other human beings, but to the spirits of Death, Love, and Time. He sleeps six or seven hours a week. He’s a zombie, a man who has left life utterly behind. Yet there’s something undeniably a little Will Smithian about his suffering. He’s like the Olympic world champion of Holding It All Inside, and Smith — unlike, you know, Casey Affleck — doesn’t give off bitter waves of doubt or dysfunction. The message is that Howard can’t recover because his love is that pure and strong. He’s holding onto his grief because he’s holding onto his love. He won’t lead an existence that compromises it.

He’d likely stay that way were it not for his trusty trio of executive partners, played by Edward Norton (divorced and broke, with a daughter who resents him), Kate Winslet (a workaholic who waited too long to start a family), and Michael Pena (who’s got one of those tell-tale coughs — ‘nuff said). They’ve decided to sell the faltering agency so they can receive a large payout, which each of them is in dire need of.

broken, it’s important to note that the first woman to ever garner the documentary feature prize was Nancy Hamilton, a wonderfully creative force who, before scoring the Oscar for her first filmmaking effort, “Helen Keller in Her Own Story,” back in 1955, had already distinguished herself in the worlds of songwriting, acting, playwriting and screenwriting. (RTRS)

LOS ANGELES:

“Gangster Squad” director Ruben Fleischer is set to direct Lionsgate’s “Jekyll,” the studio’s new take on the “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Chris Evans is attached to star.

Based on the six-episode BBC One Television mini-series from 2007, the show followed a modern-day descendant of Jekyll who begins to exhibit the trademark split personality. The father and husband abandons his family, without explaining why, and lives in a fortified basement with a psychiatric nurse as his ally. When they strap the doctor to a metal chair, she watches him transform into an alter ego who rages, shows heightened strength and speed, and can also be a charming, flirtatious scoundrel as well. The two personalities try to coexist, even though one doesn’t remember what the other does while in control of the body.

Marc Platt is producing with Ellen DeGeneres and Jeff Kleeman, through their A Very Good Production banner. Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry have written a script. (RTRS)