Recently, I went to watch the critically acclaimed "Collateral Beauty". I was a little skeptical at first because I personally prefer action or comedy movies, but I only heard great things about this movie, so I decided to take a chance and try it out. The movie is about a successful business owner who loses his 6 year old daughter to a rare form of cancer and he can't seem to make himself feel better after the tragedy. After the event, his business begins to fail and his friends and coworkers try to help him get through it by attempting to create an illusion using actors to make him feel better(more on this later). He eventually goes to a support group and finds the help that he needs and he walks off with a smile on his face and a "new found" love on his arm. Throughout the movie, you hear about 3 basic concepts of life: love, time, and death.
It immediately mentions them at the beginning of the movie. After the death of his daughter, he writes a letter to each of these 3 things in a therapeutic sense and even attempts to mail them. After 3 years of his business going downhill, his friends hire a lady to document everything that he does and she even goes as far as to steal the 3 letters that were sent to love, hate, and death. After reading the letters, his friends hire 3 actors to portray these 3 elements and make him think that he is in a crazy mental state.
Each of the 3 friends in the movie gets stuck with one of the actors to try to help them out. In the movie each friend is fighting their own battles and they conveniently get placed with the actor who is portraying what that friend is going through (i.e. one of them has a kid who doesn't want to see him, so he is placed with the lady who is acting as :Love"). Through trying to help their friend, they each learn something new about themselves as well by being with the 3 actors. After hiring the actors, they hire someone to film him talking to each of the 3 actors and they would edit the video and take the actors out to make it look as if he was talking to himself so that they could turn it into the board and show that clients should still sign with them because the main character is in a bad mental state.
After finding out that his friends had set them up, he explained that he understood the issues and even went as far as to get some help from a support group and even found an old "friend" from back when he was younger. This movie is a total tear jerker and it really makes you appreciate life and the things that you have even more because you see that there are other people out their going though their own battles. This movie is much different than any other movie because it puts a real life spin on things and shows that the death of a child or even someone that you are really close with can have a lasting impact on someone. The movie even goes as far as showing the high divorce rate among couples that lose a child and it also shows that there are others who are going through the same thing that are willing to help you. This movie taught me so any life lessons and honestly, I would love to watch it again one day. I wold personally rate this movie a 10/10.
