• Collateral Beauty Is a Misguided Astonishment

Did you ever see that movie where Will Smith plays an ad executive so shut down with grief over the death of his daughter that his business partners hire actors to confront him in public in the roles of Death, Time, and Love, the abstract concepts to whom he has been penning and mailing angry letters?

But that's not the weirdest part. The business partners want the Will Smith character to step aside, because their firm is floundering, so they set it up so that he believes that nobody but him can see Death, Time, and Love, even when he's shouting at them on the streets of Manhattan.

The plot demands that a private detective film Will Smith's character shouting at Love in the West Village and at Death on the subway. And then the business partners digitally remove the actors from that footage so it looks as if their deeply troubled friend is actually yelling at nobody.

Reminds me of that movie where Will Smith plays an aerospace engineer so shut down with guilt over the death of his fiancée and six others that he masquerades as an IRS agent, commits suicide by jellyfish in a bath of ice, and gives sight to a blind telemarketer for a meat company.