Movies: NORTON, WINSLET, PENA: TRUE FRIENDS CONSPIRE IN “COLLATERAL BEAUTY”

Howard (Will Smith) was a highly successful and dynamic advertising executive, the head of his own company. But when his six-year-old daughter succumbs to a fatal illness, Howard is cast emotionally adrift. Increasingly withdrawn from human contact, the only communication Howard now initiates are the angry, accusatory letters he writes to Love, Time, and Death. But even if Howard has given up on himself…his friends have not given up on him.

Edward Norton, Kate Winslet and Michael Pena join Will Smith as Howard's loyal friends in New Line Cinema's thought-provoking drama, Collateral Beauty.

While Howard built his career and business through the years, it was with the talent and dedication of his closest associates: Whit (Norton), the idea-guy, whose name appears alongside Howard’s on the company masthead; Claire (Winslet), their savvy account director; and Simon (Pena), the agency’s stalwart general counsel. Having grown up together in a sense, from hungry young staffers to full partners, their lives have become intertwined as friends, colleagues and family.

Together they have tried many ways to pull Howard from the abyss, to no avail. Simultaneously, they have struggled to keep the company afloat in his absence. Without his contacts and creative spark, though, accounts have fallen off and prospects run dry to the point where, now, their only option is to sell. There’s an offer on the table…but Howard holds the majority shares and he’s not taking the call.

“It’s implicit, I think, from the first scene, the closeness of their relationship,” says Edward Norton. “You know immediately that these two guys are best friends, and that’s what makes the reveal of what’s befallen them, this fracture, so painful.”

It’s arguably Whit who misses the old Howard most of all, and it’s Whit who comes up with an inspired and unorthodox idea to try to get him to reconnect. “At first Claire thinks it’s a joke,” says Kate Winslet of her character. “She’s used to Whit being kind of crazy, but still, this is never going to work. As soon as she realizes he’s being serious and that they could do this together, I think she believes they can genuinely help Howard.”

The truth is, beyond their heartfelt concern for Howard, each of them has his or her own challenges, which they are not fully understanding or addressing, and which naturally come into play as the story unfolds.

Whit, for example, initially appears as he wants people to see him: confident, creative and charming, without a care in the world and ever hopeful that his next great romance will be the one. “However,” says director David Frankel, “he’s made a lot of mistakes along the way and just can’t believe what’s happened to his life.”

Claire, meanwhile, has been avoiding the truth for a long time. In many respects a classic nurturer – she leaves take-out dinners for Howard night after night, despite his perpetually closed door – Claire has postponed some aspects of her personal life, while pouring all her energy and commitment into the company and her career.

Finally, there’s something going on with Simon, something that could significantly affect his family, and he doesn’t know how to tell them, or even if he should.

“Overall,” says screenwriter Allan Loeb, “we wanted these to be real, flawed characters. Howard isn’t the only one who needs perspective, who needs to be healed through this piece; it’s the three of them also. It becomes their journey and their lesson too.”

Opening across the Philippines on January 8, 2017, Collateral Beauty is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment company.

Movies: FIND YOUR WAY BACK TO LIFE, LOVE WITH “COLLATERAL BEAUTY”

New Line Cinema's upcoming inspirational drama “Collateral Beauty” is about finding your way back to life and love in the wake of unspeakable loss, and about those unexpected moments of hope, meaning and connection – the proverbial silver linings – that light the path through even the darkest times.

“It’s those things we sometimes take for granted or don’t notice all the time, but that might be there every day, like a sunset…or fleeting, like a child’s smile,” says director David Frankel. “There are millions of examples of collateral beauty; they’re unique, and we all have different ideas about what they could be. They’re the reason that we go on, and I think what’s really compelling about this story is that it reminds us to take notice of those brilliant fragments of life that make it worth living.”

Discovering those moments illuminated by every tragic event is an emotional and spiritual journey profoundly personal to each individual, yet something that we all share. Set amidst the warmth, energy and often bittersweet notes of the holiday season in New York City, “Collateral Beauty” tells the life-affirming story of one man’s progress through the landscape of loss and what he ultimately finds – with heart, candor, a thread of humor and the recognition that there will always be some things beyond our understanding.

“The way you see the world, the way your heart opens and the way you relate to people after a tragedy can be very beautiful,” observes screenwriter Allan Loeb, who is also one of the film’s producers. “It can be transformative.”

For Loeb, it began as the germ of a concept that grew to capture his imagination until it could not be denied. “It came together piece by piece over a long period of time as I wrote other movies and worked on other things,” he recounts. “It was a little story in my head that kept nagging at me, about a man who writes letters to abstractions like time, love and death, and why would he do that?”

Howard (played by Will Smith) was a highly successful and dynamic advertising executive, the head of his own company, for whom those words once represented powerful marketing tools. They were great motivators. In an early scene evoking his former passion, he is seen addressing a rapt crowd with the statement: “These three things connect every single human being on Earth. We long for love. We wish we had more time. And we fear death.”

But after his six-year-old daughter succumbs to a fatal illness, casting Howard emotionally adrift, these concepts take on a larger meaning. Increasingly withdrawn from human contact, the only communication Howard now initiates are the angry, accusatory letters he writes to Love, Time, and Death.

“He’s struggling with big, philosophic questions and looking to the universe for answers,” Frankel says. “Like a modern-day King Lear, you might say, he’s howling at the gods.”

Eventually, Howard’s fixation gives his friends an idea to possibly break him out of his endless malaise by somehow allowing him to confront these very concepts. They’ve tried every other means of help from traditional grief counseling to shamanistic rituals, offered comfort and patience, and nothing has worked.

Howard’s friends are also his closest colleagues and long-time business partners: Whit, played by Edward Norton, Claire, played by Kate Winslet, and Simon, played by Michael Peña. Though their concern for him is genuine, their plan has a practical side, too, as Howard’s disconnection from the daily functions has brought the company to the brink of insolvency and they must quickly affect a sale to save it.

Thus one day, while at his usual bench in the dog park, Howard is approached by a self-assured woman smartly dressed in vivid blue, who sits beside him. She holds a letter he recently posted to Death. Taking him completely off-guard, she introduces herself as the recipient of that letter. When Howard recoils, she reminds him that people are forever seeking answers from the universe but not many are granted a direct response. And so it begins…

Opening across the Philippines on January 8, 2017, Collateral Beauty is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment company.