It’s a common Hollywood misconception that hanging a few baubles and some tinsel on any old tosh will mitigate the cynicism of the central idea. It doesn’t. If anything, in the case of this mawkish seasonal drama about a man recovering from the death of his six-year-old daughter, it only highlights the manipulative calculation involved.
Will Smith plays Howard, an advertising exec derailed by grief who writes blistering letters to Love, Death and Time. His business partners, hoping to oust him from the company, hire actors to impersonate the three “abstractions”. They plan to film his distressed rants and then digitally remove the actors to make him appear unhinged. Because that’s what you would do to a friend who is struggling with the death of his daughter. The only thing more remarkable than the crudeness of the central idea is the extensive cast of A-listers who decided this synthetic weepy with its fortune-cookie wisdom was a good thing to do.
