Collateral Beauty is a thought-provoking, quotable feature film

Over the holidays, Will Smith’s newest film, Collateral Beauty, came out in theaters. And while the trailer alone was a bit of a tear-jerker, the entire film was full of incredibly quotable conversations and an audience of 90% women in varying degrees of tears. At some points, it almost feels like the filmmakers are purposefully poking your eyes with sticks, but mostly the film serves as a beautiful story and lesson about seeing the good in the world, even in times of great suffering.

Any film beginning with the death of a child is going to be a somber one, and that’s exactly how Collateral Beauty starts off. It stars Will Smith as Howard Inlet, an advertising executive who lost his six year old daughter two years before the film takes place. He has essentially closed in upon himself, and his colleagues are concerned about the future of their company with his detachment from reality. As he writes letters to the abstract concepts of death, time, and love about the loss of his child, he begins to actually receive responses and starts to discover life again.

There are times at which this film feels like a manipulative jerk, using exaggerations and calculating dialogue to wring tears from the audience. However, with the gifted acting of Will Smith and his costars, a majority of the movie is believable and seems more realistic than it probably is. The characters are sympathetic and full of depth, each with a unique situation or problem, but most of their situations seem embellished and far-fetched.

Once you get over the arrows being thrown in your eyes by the writers, and the outlandish nature of the character’s situations, there is definitely something to be learned from the film. The title quote of the movie is, “Just be sure to notice the collateral beauty,” said by a woman to the mother of the child that dies. It conveys the main theme that there is beauty in everything, in death, in grief, in anger, and it encourages people to notice and focus on that beauty even in the hardest of times.

There are also a wide range of fantastic quotes from the conversations held between Howard and death, time, and love. As each abstraction is brought to life, they allow a new understand of those ideas and how they fit into our lives. Death is a purposeful cleansing to give life meaning, time is an elusive idea slipping through the human mind, and love is a string weaving it’s way through everyone and everything.

The conversations and ideas are made possible by the situations in the film, so their hyperbolic disposition is excusable. The most valuable part of the film is the thought it evokes afterwards. How do those concepts shape your own life? What is the collateral beauty that exists around us? Do we see it or are we blind to the grace and delicacy of the universe.

So while Collateral Beauty may not be the most realistic or well put together film of 2016, it is certainly worth a watch if you’re in the mood for tears or deep contemplation. Collateral Beauty is currently in theaters nearby.