Text written for the IBCP course

The film Collateral Beauty brought together an all-star cast (Will Smith, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, and Helen Mirren, among others) in a story about deep and universal themes: grief, pain, and resilience. At that time, five years into the COVID-19 pandemic, no one would have suspected the current situation and the need to reflect on Life, Death, and Time in a direct but poetic way.

Allan Loeb‘s original story began to be worked on two years earlier, with a first cast announced in 2015 (Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara would star) until he managed to close with the actors we see on screen, a year later. For Loeb, it was important to tell the story of someone who went through a terrible loss and became angry, destroyed and so wrote letters to the Universe in a deep outburst.

And that’s it, we follow a happy and motivated Howard (Will Smith) inspiring the team only to immediately return to him a year later, isolated, devastated, and in deep depression. The cause was the death of his six-year-old daughter, and in his grief, he writes letters to abstract concepts — Love, Time, and Death — something that scares his friends and partners. With the noose around their necks, they need to solve business problems and, as they are creative, they decide to hire actors so that they can give Howard personified answers to each element. The desperate proposal is because since the intervention did not solve it, nor did the therapy group, radicalization is the only alternative left.

As always in a good story, the path to redemption is not only the hero’s, and here we have what in English is an ensemble cast, with several interconnected plots building the narrative as a whole. Each one has a problem to solve, even if unconsciously and “coincidentally” they are responsible for the theme that in theory is only about Howard. In theory.

The story follows an interesting rational line to explore the process of mourning and its phases. According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, there are five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The time in each one depends on the person and here, Howard is still stuck in the first two, unable to gather the strength to go through the other three. This apathy towards life is not only harmful to him but also to his friends who are also confronted with his issues.

The unconventional proposal of manipulating Howard’s notion of reality works here because it is fiction, lacking the warning “don’t try this at home”. What the film gets right is that, in order to move forward in mourning, it is necessary for Howard to confront his feelings through internal or external dialogue, and in the external, he personally knows the psychological archetypes to which he sent the letters and which he had blocked in his life.

Closed off from affection, stuck in the past with no ability to envision a future, and revolted by the inevitability of death, we travel with Howard and his friends as they reflect on pain in times of emotional crisis.

Just like the Apple TV Plus series Shrinking, I am somewhat concerned when Hollywood applies delicate concepts to create a fantasy story. In Shrinking, the widowed therapist, also trying to overcome grief, decides to directly interfere in the lives of his patients to achieve an immediate “change,” with comical but dangerously unethical results. It seemed the same to me in Collateral Beauty, but I got carried away by the idea. The ideal would be to further emphasize the importance of social support in times of grief, but there wouldn’t be a story with a happy ending in 1h30 if they didn’t take “liberties.”

From the perspective of Freud, who also dedicated part of his studies to the grieving process, this period “occurs when the ego needs to accept the loss of a loved object” and it obviously differs from individual to individual. According to him, the natural melancholy of this process “is a pathological reaction, in which the ego identifies with the lost object, internalizing it destructively”, and this is what we see with Howard, unable to break the cycle of pain, compulsively reliving the pain, often risking his own life.

Unable to accept the death of his daughter, who is only 6 years old, he is unconsciously trapped in the trauma, feeding on the pain. The letters symbolize his defense mechanism, trying to expose what he cannot process internally, creating a bridge between the conscious and the unconscious.

In the first scene, we see how Howard knew the human soul very well, citing precisely the universal archetypes as the driving force of consumption (he is an advertiser) and it is a metalanguage of what the film Collateral Beauty also proposes.

We can also see that Howard’s friends, in the psychoanalytic process, play a role in Transference and Countertransference, which is the projection of their own unconscious problems and conflicts onto others. a person or object, in this case, both Howard and the actors hired.

In the conclusion, which is positive for everyone, Howard seems to be heading towards a process of sublimation (“the ability to transform drives into culturally or emotionally significant achievements”), reconnecting with his ex-wife, and leaving his confinement.

The title, which translated highlights the idea of ​​seeing “Beauty in Pain”, if it were literal, would be to treat loss and pain as side effects of life and evolution, with their beauty in overcoming. Because traumas are inevitable, they can transform us positively, going through the painful acceptance of the end and the beginning again, giving meaning to life. With the inevitable suggestion that, in the end, there are no actors, but we are all in the same theater of life.

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