Howard is the most successful manager of a large company. Struck by the tragedy of the death of six-year-old daughter, unable to return to live. His three best friends and colleagues longtime come to know who wrote the letters, Time, Love and Death, and hired three comedians impersonate because these abstract entities and to dialogue with Howard, shaking it and bringing it back to the awareness that his life has not ended.

Not even in the hands of a great visionary author, a script like this, it would be safe; least of all in the hands of David Frankel and a cast too oddly assorted, where great actors and -Norton Winslet- remain badly crushed in their potential and only Helen Mirren manages to emerge as deserves, but does it with a character from the play, launched like a top on a crazed ultra dramatic carpet.

Not that a light dose is not covered at the start, it is no doubt, but is not that the play, but the sentimental of “A Christmas Carol” Dickens, the film explicitly resumes in the figures of the three actors who, like angels, see deep into the lives of their interlocutors. Even here, however, the forces out there, and above all becomes clearer, along the way, which Collateral Beauty contains two films that do not meet except in an illusory, only apparent. On the one hand, the melodrama starring Will Smith and Naomie Harris, film “impossible” for her brought tragic, tackled without ever remove the tears from his eyes by getting sobbing inventions (dominoes, letters) and with a final twist that it would have been more suited to a short film on a project with these ambitions. On the other hand, a film more independent flavor and the most unique person, a small company of actors paid for out of the comfort zone of their little theater off Broadway and measure their art with a demand of real life, a land of which can not be wrong, worth the aggravation of an already unbearable suffering. A difficult test, that Keira Knightley is likely to fail, not so much in fiction, but on the main stage, that of the film itself.