Collateral Beauty (2016 film): Are they real? (review)

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW, BIG ONES

Foreword

I’ve not experienced the death of a child, let alone of my own child. I did however, experience the death of my father from cancer in 2006, a brief but very brutal four-month ride from diagnosis to death, and something struck me at that time. When Mary meets Simeon in the Temple when they bring Jesus as an infant (Luke 2), Simeon states that her heart too will be pierced by a sword. I remember thinking at the time of my father’s death that that sword was beauty. I almost hesitate to use the word because it has become so trivialized and de-clawed, turned into a sentiment on a Hallmark card. Real deep beauty is violent, brutal, and merciless. It is other things as well; it can give hope. But it is also brutal.

The title of this film interested me from the moment I saw the preview because it is obvious that it is a take off on the phrase “collateral damage.” The clear idea on the surface is that damage is not the only thing that can happen “accidentally,” but I think that there is also a subtextual thing that happens in placing beauty and damage in the same context, that a door is opened for recognizing beauty as also painful.

Intro

I have to admit that this is a film that might be hard for me to review. First of all, it would be hard for me, even if I wanted, to entirely pan any movie in which I got to see NYC scenery I recognize that nobody who hasn’t spent time there will know. For instance, I know he was biking across the Williamsburg bridge (rather than the Brooklyn or the Manhattan or the Queensboro) from the maroon chain link fence because I have ridden that bridge path a number of times.

I know that the film got panned by critics, Rotten Tomatoes giving it 12% and metatcritic 24%, which is going to be the main subject of this intro and gives rise to me noting a potential problem with critics (lack of respect). Sorry, but anybody who equates difficulties with grief processing (Howard) and miserly rancor (Scrooge), as does Emily Yoshida in her review in Vulture by calling it a Christmas Carol remake, simply has no soul (or is trying to bury it).

Rotten Tomatoes said “aims for uplift but collapses in unintentional hilarity.” The thing is, if I had to place real money (of which I have precious little) on it, I would bet that the majority members of the general popular audience interviewed by CinemaScore who gave it an A minus (average) said “I’d give it an A minus because it was great fun and had me rolling in the aisle when they revealed the relationship at the and when he finally said the name.” There may be many areas in which the film can be critiqued as far as execution of its project or pacing or internal consistency on the mechanical level (of which I will look at a couple instances below), and there can even be places where there are real questions as to whether, say, in an individual scene, lines meant as brief humor relief for balance actually overpower the more meaningful lines. But to paint the whole as “collapsing into … hilarity,” especially the climax scene in which Howard (Willis) speaks the name, where there is no question of something initially intended as a humorous relief going wrong, bespeaks at best an insensitivity to, and at worst a concrete disrespect for, suffering of this kind, and I think it is precisely the exposition of suffering of this kind that has endeared audiences to it (A minus is pretty high on a scale of F to A plus), and thus the critical response disrespects the audience.

What this kind of criticism reminds me of is an issue of patient-on-doctor violence in East Asian healthcare systems, which I learned about this past year in copy-editing an edited volume on medical education in East Asia. The problem is one of bedside manner and sensitivity on the personal/psychological level. In medical education in East Asia, there is such a high level of competition and rapid advancement that you have healthcare professionals who are very technically proficient at a very young age but have little experience in actually handling people themselves as persons. And that handling is not something that you can really delegate: when it is the surgeon whose hands will actually be inside your body and handling your vital organs, you will focus on him or her no matter what some administrator tells you about how you’re supposed to be looking to another handler for personal interaction and bedside manner. And if that person who is going to be actually invading your personal space doesn’t have a certain sensitivity, things can get edgy very quickly (the invasion can’t be avoided, and the rewards are often saving your life … but that doesn’t change the fact that, psychologically, it is experienced as an invasion into your body). Obviously, you can’t download a few decades of human interaction into a young physician in a matter of minutes or hours (or even weeks or months) so that they have the sensitivity of a professional who has been practicing for decades, and so one of the proposed solutions is to increase the quantity of liberal arts and humanities material in curriculums as a way to increase sensitivity for human issues, concerns, themes etc, meaning of human persons as wholes, including the emotional, rather than just the technical aspects of biological bodies.

I’m not qualified to assess whether this method is working or could work for that need (decreasing patient-on-doctor violence). My main point in bringing it all up is just to note that I think there is a similarity between that situation and a group of critics who are all too well versed in the technical aspects of film making and maybe even of story-telling but far too insensitive to the fact that it might be the resonances of trying to cope with suffering in the death of a loved one, and even more so of a child, that makes general audiences have a positive encounter with the film.

[Sidenote (for those who have not worked with academic publications as much): “edited volume” means a volume with pieces by various authors that have been compiled by one or more main editors, not the fact that it is copy-edited etc by a functionary like me … in this case, the main editor was the current president of the China Medical Board, an institute founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1914 (this volume was the third that has been published in connection with the centennial anniversary in 2014). But I never had any contact with him, or even with Indiana University Press, who published the volume; I only ever talked to my project manager at the third-party publishing services provider company through whom I got the contract.]

A Brief Thought on Structure: Community

I liked having the three personifications pair up with the three members of his life who most match them because of their issues so that the film is not entirely about Howard’s individual arc. Their character arcs are intertwined with his, and I think it gives the whole a community aspect.

As soon as I saw that one each of the friends began to deal specifically with one each of the actors, I knew that there would be something specific about the friend that related to the individual personification the actor was hired to play, death, love or time, and that was the moment when I realized the communal aspect and started to get into the film (before that I had not been getting my hopes up because of the reviews).

(Side Note: I thought Norton and Winslet were really good, and I was REALLY happy to see Michael Peña in a substantial character role in a major film because I have always seen him in either very side roles or comedic stuff like Ant Man, and I thought he carried his weight incredibly in Collateral Beauty … and it was a big weight to carry).

The Question of Realism:

an Introductory Example

So, being as my overall thing in this post is going to be the question of whether it matters whether or not the personifications are the real things or just the actors hired, I want to introduce the whole question of “realism” with an instance that it seems to me might be accused of not being realistic.

The instance in question is that his wife seems not to recognize him and acts as a complete stranger, which could be seen as unrealistic. A particular instance would be that she asks him if he is among the majority percentage of couples who divorce after the loss of a child and then reveals to him that she is. This is material information that they both would have known already, that they got divorced: they would know it because it was precisely each other from whom they had gotten divorced, and so there would be no need to ask or tell. Even if she were trying to “give him some distance” in a normal way, this would seem odd to ask him. And so, this could be criticized as unrealistic.

But immediately at the end of this interchange is where we get the logic for that, if we have ears to hear. She shows him the note that he himself wrote that says something to the effect of “if we could only be strangers again.” First it’s important to explicate what (I think) he was expressing when he originally wrote that note. I think he means that if they were strangers again, there would be a place for them to go with a relationship. But they are not strangers; particularly what they know in each other is the loss of their daughter, and that is painful and, for him, stands in the way of their ongoing relationship.

Now, as for whether it is realistic for her to act as a stranger to him, I think that it is simply her respecting his wishes in that note or her following the cue of that note that maybe there is a way forward if they approach as strangers. I think that when the relationship is revealed, rather than the “meeting as strangers” becoming unrealistic, it actually becomes revealed that her actions all along have been respecting that wish he expressed.

I also think that there is a prevalent misconception in a simplistic idea of knowing other people, a mistakenly assumed dichotomy between people we know and strangers, between knowing those we know and not knowing those we don’t. Married couples who have been married a long time are known to say that, every day, they still find out something they didn’t realize about their spouse. On a more existential level, I have seen longlasting marital love defined as the commitment to, in a certain sense, being willing to wake up every day with a stranger because you are both continually changing in a myriad of small ways (I’m not sure, but I think it may have been in a rebuttal “poem” of sorts to the whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing, one spouse writing to another in the general style of the lines from that book but talking about the choices of sacrifice for the other that define real lasting love rather than the gratuitous erotica content for which that book was known).

I would like to add here one final detail from the performance of Naomie Harris in that climactic scene (and, yes, I have to admit that I have a fondness for her from when she played Tia Dalma in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3). The line is in when the revelations really begin but you have not fully gotten to the real revelation of their relationship. It is when she tells him, before you know that their lost daughters are the same girl, that she has just been watching a video of her daughter and asks “can I show it to you?” First of all, anybody who can listen to that performance (which I thought was killer on her part; she nailed it: the slight tremor in the voice that is a quiet but intense plea) and have even the most basic recognition of the scene as the climax of the film and still reduce the film as a whole to “hilarity” does not, in my opinion, have a soul.

I want to note, just as exposition of the story-telling art in the film, that there is a progression here. We do not yet know that they were married, but obviously in THAT context, she is asking “can we speak to each other or share things with each other about our daughter.” But when she speaks the line it is only the lead-up to that, and there is a possible meaning, a possible discernable character moment here even in the construct of what the audience has thought to be the case up til now (“strangers”), a character moment that paves the way for the real revelation, so it’s not just another misleading thing or merely a cipher-related thing that has meaning only after the revelation has occurred, when it can mean “please talk to me about OUR daughter.”

The character moment is that, up til now, even within the “we’re strangers” construct, she has been primarily the therapeutic functionary. I’m not saying she has been clinically cold or anything like that, but simply that all of her statements have been for his sake and his processing as they might be for anybody for whom she is doing this service of running the group. But when she asks that question, “can I show it to you,” with that tremble in the voice, she is not asking “can I show you a video of my daughter because I think seeing somebody else share about their child might be helpful for you to share about yours and begin processing the grief.” She is not asking it for HIS sake; she is asking it for HERS. As I said, this works even when she is just playing the role of the counselor type whom he didn’t know before stepping in the door to the meeting, and that leads up to and really sets the stage for the revelation that she is asking him to connect as her husband.

This character moment is that, even as the “stranger” counselor, she is saying that she is stepping beyond her counselor role and asking for something from another person that would mean something for her. Even as a counselor, she is always the one organizing and facilitating for others, and a moment of key character interaction is happening even in that construct when she asks to be able to share a video of her daughter with another person because it would help her. Her performance to me seemed to say, within the “strangers” construct, “I know you have lost a child and that having somebody else share with you about their child might be difficult, but it would really help me.”

My point about artistry is simply that you have a moment that has real character significance in the illusory context (“we could be strangers again”) that is a signpost and set-up for the revelation of the real context.

A Further Gripe

As anybody halfway insightful who is reading this can tell, I have a bit of a gripe with critics who label a film like this as “hilarity.” Beyond the whole possible belittlement of portrayal of grief, there is a further issue for me of a belittling of the presentation of an important psychological principle, and that is the power and necessity of speaking about things.

This is a very powerful and important point. It’s the basis of all talk therapy, whether one-on-one within the “construct” or “frame” with just a therapist or in a support group session. Talking about issues, naming them, is key to processing them emotionally, and it can be very hard. It is the key climax of the film when he can actually speak his daughter’s name and her age and her disease (and, what a performance by Will Smith).

[Sidenote: See my post on the found-footage horror film “As Above So Below” for the “speaking it” theme in another genre and context.)

There may be plenty of room for critique on how well a film did or did not carry through on the project of conveying that in story form, and even whether it was too “on the sleeve” when it should have been more subtle … but “hilarity” is not really the term for any of that.

And, while I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not some whiz analyst of pacing, I would still state that my take is that this section was paced well. As I said above, the plausibility of the “can I show it to you” key character/relationship advancement line even within the “strangers” construct keeps you hooked in without revealing the real thing prematurely. Then her giving him the card again that he wrote starts to tip the viewer off because it seems a bit out of place in the “strangers” construct and makes them ask “that’s odd, why is she showing him that again when she already told him that little bit about her husband writing her that note? Is there some more significance to it?” And this leads directly into the pan around the corner and her starting the video when we find out it was him.

(Of course, I am sure that there are many who saw it coming before that, and probably others who will say that the fact that they didn’t see it coming means that it was too out of place … I am the type who usually doesn’t see such things coming, but it could also be argued that I don’t see them coming because I tend to get hooked into the story more and don’t do as much sitting above it and analyzing and suspecting).

The Three Personifications and Reality

So, the basic set up, as the reader knows if having seen the film (and if the reader hasn’t and they don’t like spoilers, they should stop reading right here), and as I alluded to this above, the film’s hook in for the “see, we didn’t give it all away in the trailer” is that the three personifications of death, love, and time are three actors found by White (Norton), hired by him, Claire (Winslet), and Stan (Peña) to play Death, Time, and Love. From the point we find that out, we’re kind of focused on whether or not Whit, Claire, and Stan will be able to pull off the ploy to do what they need to do with the business deal.

I am going to assert that, as far as anybody in the film knows, they are just actors. This is a different situation from that of the audience. The audience is given solid reason early on to expect that they will not be just the actors. And then the audience gets confirmation near the end of the film. The early solid hint is when Helen Mirren as Brigitte/Death says to Kiera Knightly as Amy/Love “well done, you” in a situation in which only the audience and the three actors can hear it. The confirmation comes when the audience finds out that Mirren was the old lady who talked to Madeleine (Naomie Harris) in the hospital hallway outside of their dying daughter’s room. That confirmation was one of the few times I actually saw something like that coming because Madeleine’s first telling of it was such a marked statement moment (it’s the locus of the title, “collateral beauty”) and you even got a body glimpse of the person but they didn’t show the face.

Some might say that the obviousness of Mirren/Death in Madeliene’s first telling is a weakness, but if it is, I don’t think it is a huge flaw, and this is because of what I see as central under this heading, which I don’t think gets damaged by that flaw, and which is that it is only ever the audience that knows that the actors are more than actors, and that includes Will Smith. He sees them on the bridge in Central Park at the end, but there is no real guarantee that he recognizes them as more than projections OR that he thinks it problematic if they are only projections. They could be a bit like John Nash’s three hallucination characters at the end of Beautiful Mind (Ed Harris, Paul Bettany, and the little girl), and he could be at peace with them as such, just as Nash is with his. By the fact that they are not there when his wife Madeleine looks up and that it could be this is his new vision too (the bridge now with the actors not there), we could even hypothesize not unrealistically that he has seen the last of even the “illusions.”

The Real Deal

I think that Howard is able to manage this all because he has an in on what is a core element in the film: in reality, it doesn’t quite matter whether they are “real” as personifications in the film … because they are real in real life. They are exterior to us, and so they are objective. And they are heavy, very heavy. Love, Time, and Death are very real forces whether the actors in the film are really Love, Time, and Death personified. I thought this was the most creative aspect of the film and the thing that saved it from being simplistic as having personifications of abstracts.

The real thing is that only those who need to see them. I will mention in a moment a possible  weak spot in the mechanics where it is possible that more than just the three friends and Howard see them, but definitely the only people with whom we see them interact in any depth are Howard, Whit, Claire, and Stan. And for each of these people, they are very real things pressing on them. They see them because they need to see them. In reality, they are seeing the real life “versions” of them (their own worries about them) so oppressively that it’s all blurred and they need to see a personification to help focus (whether that be an actual personification of the element or some actor they hired to play a role who also speaks some core truth to them about the issue that they really need to hear in a focused way).

At the end of it all, what I thought was most creative was the fact that the question does not need to be answered as to whether they were “real” or not. The question definitely is answered for the audience in the affirmative. As I said above, it may be answered for Howard in the affirmative, we just can’t tell. But for Whit, Claire, and Stan, it is actually answered in the negative: we never get any indication that they recognize that the actors are anything other than actors.

This is one place where I think there may be some confusion on the part of critics (although, as a reader can guess, if this is so, I think the critics then go beyond simple confusion and assume a magisterial stance in declaring their readings etc). There are things that could be taken as lacking the gravitas befitting personifications of such heavy things, and there’s definitely room to examine and argue about how well certain things were executed or whether they were overdone etc… but not without (at least on my dime) first admitting the possibility that a certain amount of human foible coloring is fitting with keeping Whit, Claire, and Stan from seeing the actors as more than human actors and that keeping them in the dark all the way through might be part of emphasizing that the question isn’t whether it’s really the personifications or just human actors who have tapped into some deep wells of human insight and meaning etc in their acting (like Raffi being able to tell Claire thinks a lot about the baby clock … an insightful person would be able to guess at that one). The point is that, whatever the answer to that question may be, the situations in their lives as instances of each issue are real and the need for dealing with them are real, just as Howard’s need for processing the grief of the death of his daughter is real.

Death

Finally, just to be clear, and to provide myself a little place to drop in something I really want to drop in, let me reiterate that, despite what I will note in a moment as a potential mechanical weakness, the construct of the film purports a situation in which nobody but the audience knows for sure whether they are the actual personifications or just human actors, and at least the majority of characters in the film believe them to be just the actors (Howard being the only one who even possibly knows that they are the real personifications).

The main thing I want to drop in on that is the note that it is Death that makes that revelation for the audience in both cases that clue the audience in to their “reality”: saying “well done, you” to Amy/Love and talking to Madeleine in the hospital hallway. For Qoheleth in the Hebrew Bible, death is the great leveler and equalizer (all are equal in death, all are “vanity of vanities” in death, rich and poor alike, wise and fool alike), and in this film, as in many other works of art in the Western tradition, death is a revealer.

There are many resonances here even on the contemporary popular level. The most accurate term for these characters would be “anthropomorphisised personifications of a naturalised phenomena,” which comes from Terry Pratchett’s discworld description of, yes, his Death character, who often has some of the deepest things to say and reveal (and with some of the deepest humor … and I thought death suggesting that she herself fill in the role of the other too works as a nice little parallel, whether intended or not, to Pratchett’s Death having to fill in for the Hogfather in the novel of that name). Not only the final episode of Person of Interest but even Heath Ledger’s Joker (with two very different tones) note that death is the revealer of who a person really is: in that moment of death you see who they really are. And as far as Christian tradition, it is at the Cross that the Roman centurion can say “truly, this man was the son of God.”

“We All Die Alone”

But there is a little more in this film that comes from a central role of death as the revealer to the audience that they really are the actual personifications. As I said was important, each of the three friends—Whit, Claire, and Stan—pair up with one and only one of the personifications. More importantly, while it is clear that they can see and hear all of them in group conversations, the bulk of their interaction with their respective personifications is private … you don’t get any scenes of them telling each other what was said by their respective personification (in each of their cases, but especially Stan’s, this would have spilled some major beans).

And this is the “little more” I just mentioned. I’m a huge fan of Jim Butcher’s Dresden files series of novels, and there is one line that struck me harder than maybe any other in all those books, and that is: “We all die alone.”

This is not to be despairing or jaded; it is just a simple fact that when one person is going someplace the other is not following at present, they are alone (however, I believe there is a moral obligation to try, as best we can, not to let anyone die alone … it’s the paradox of it: even though you can’t stop them from dying alone, you have to be there to give what company and love there can be and, for your own part, to suffer your own loneliness in the situation. I took the graveyard shift at the nursing home in my dad’s room during the last several weeks of his life; on the last night he was alive, I had his hand in my face pushing me away as I asked what he wanted me to get while he was having a panic attack that made him jumpy and not wanting the oxygen cannula on, and of course, the decreased oxygen only made the panic worse; and in the morning before I left, I said the Our Father and he said “amen”; that is just life … and death).

As I have said, there is room to ask whether or not the balance of the human personality of the actors (Brigitte, Amy, and Raffi) and the gravitas of the personifications (Death, Love, and Time) are well executed, and definitely room to critique whether or not Mirren’s character as written and performed does justice to the gravitas of all the things I just said about death, but those questions should be asked with respect for the fact that resonances with experiences of these issues, especially death, may be a cause for the popular audience to find the film meaningful (and, I for one thought Knightley’s performance of the “I was there in those things too” line was good).

As related at the outset, Rotten Tomatoes said the film “tries for uplift but collapses in unintentional hilarity.” But the critics are not a magisterium for me as they are for some, and I don’t think I have really any guarantee that what they think would be successful “uplift” would not seem cheap or gaudy to me.

Possible Mechanical Weakness

There may be a problem in the mechanics of “verified only to the audience” in that it would seem to be implied that the private investigator  granny is able to see the actors, which is implied in her actions in being in on the scheme. If the friends said “go observe how things go with our actors and take video when he starts yelling at them” and then she said “um … what actors? He really was just talking to air” … that would be problematic. For that matter too, if anybody other than PI Granny did the actual work on the videos of removing the actors, then those technicians would also have to be able to see the personifications, otherwise you get technicians going “take who out of the video?” and that gets messy.

The difficulty and ambiguity of this is actually addressed, basically admitted, at the very beginning, when the actors ask what the specifications will be and clarify the biggest one as who will be able to see them. Obviously they are talking about situations like the grandson asking PI Granny a question that leads Howard to believe he is seeing something only he sees and the scene with Claire talking to Howard with Time sitting on the table behind them. But I think it also works as a sort of little admission that the mechanics of this whole thing are a bit difficult to pull off, meaning not just for them as characters in the film, but the actual project of the film itself (I knew from the first that I saw the trailer that it was an ambitious project to do well).

But this doesn’t unsettle me too much for three reasons. The first is that these possible viewers are working for the people the personifications want to impact and really see them only to the extent necessary for that gig to work.

The second is that people being able to see a body does not mean that they see what is really going on: they don’t see Death or Love or Time; they see Brigitte or Amy or Raffi (I love some of the stuff Pratchett does along this line with the visualization of Death, particularly when he goes by the name Bill Door as a farmhand while he is fired by the auditors in Reaper Man).

And the third is that, as I have said in my post on “storytime,” material details always break down at some point under the weight of the meaning in stories (kairos always breaks chronos and other material details), it’s just part of what happens in stories that mean anything more than a scientific logbook of events.

Along this line would be the shooting of the subway car argument Howard has with Death: from where the PI Granny is sitting, it would be very difficult to manipulate the video; it would be different than simply removing elements as with the Love and Time videos when the fill in work would be so simple (stable building and street texture) because they have to fill in a good bit of the right side of Howard’s body because, from where PI Granny is sitting, it is blocked from the view of her phone came by Mirren’s actual body.

But these sorts of things are precisely why people talk about the need to “suspend disbelief” in a story. If you want complete material consistency, you’re going to have to read a hard sciences textbook and not a story with characters and a plot that is trying to make a point about human life as human, as something beyond being rocks or minerals or even animals.

That is not to say one should not try to get as much material accuracy as one can. There is a point to going for realism and consistency. Just don’t be expecting to iron out all the bugs and still make a film that is interesting.

Addendum March-ish 2017

I watched this again about a week after it came out on DVD in March 2017 while on my elliptical machine and had a couple extra thoughts.

1. What I said just above about possible mechanical weakness is a red herring; there is no weakness because they get that out of the way right away and I think in a good way as kind of boiler plate. They let us know from the beginning that they are the real personifications (Helen Mirren/Brigitte/Death to Kiera Knightley/Amy/Love: "good job, you!" for getting Whit in the door), and that there is a ground rule: we choose who can see us and who can't. ... And then they move on to the more important things, like how the themes play for this man (and for the Whit, Claire, and Simon ... because, notice, the tactics each actor will employ arises out of coordination or debate with the human counterpart: Love pretty much uses Whit's script whole and Time sticks do his guns against Claire's comments against his "I'm pissed off he's calling me out" tactic). It's a way of saying, "listen, if you're looking for one of these movies where afterward it's the big mystery whether we were the real things or just actors and for which you can have debates about where there were holes in who could see us and who couldn't or little clues hidden about whether we were or were not and that is the great mystery to be solved, we're just going to lay it all out on the table here and get that little modern movie critic's game out of the way: we're the real deal and we get seen or not seen by whomever we choose ... and now we're going to get on to the real shit." Just the way the three actors first ask "well, what are the rules?" and then when the humans are fuddling around a bit, say "ok, we figured that out, we get to choose who will and won't see us depending on what works for our needs ... not onto more important things."

2. Scrooge? It struck me that I need to address this issue of comparison to Christmas Carol a little more squarely because, indeed, he is the one in the beginning who has been seen to be talking about what could be called manipulation of deep human themes for money. My basic thought on this is that this is not necessarily crass materialism but that it does stand in unique danger of worse than crass materialism and that maybe that is why the movie has to happen in the first place. All marketing plays on deep human themes in some way or another, and marketing in general is a necessary part of life. I think the film The Big Kahuna with Kevin Spacey, Danny Devito, and Peter Facinelli (sp?) carries this through very well ... economics is part of life because people have to eat to live and it takes money to have a building and books and well-trained educators for your children. But Howard does stand in a uniquely precarious balance as the one who can recognize the connections, and perhaps that is why he has to feel the pain of death the most brutally so that he can be the real genuine person in handling what are some pretty powerful insights. I don't think this answers all questions or is even the core of the film, but I don't know that anything will answer all questions because it is such a heavy theme. As Michael Pena's character Simon says, "nothing that starts with the death of a 6 year old child is going to feel right," but such deaths happen and there is a point to a piece of art examining the human themes at play in them and here I think they also managed to bring it to bear somewhat on the responsibility demanded of those who wind up wielding the great power of being insightful and capable of acting on their insights in the area of how deep human motivations play out in everyday life acts like product choice. I still don't think it is the same thing as Scrooge's miserlynesss ... actually I think that, were it actualized it a negative direction, it could be much worse, but I don't think it is actualized in that direction, but the need to guard against that and the theme of "with great responsibility comes great power" can definitely be an subpoint that is part of the main points I discussed above.

3. Literary Artistry: I realized that they foreshadow the "if only we could be strangers again" and "ok, I'll play that role" thing with Madeline, Howard's wife. They do it in Whit's (Norton) pitch of the idea to Claire (Winslet) and Simon (Pena), when he describes the tactic his uber driver suggested of "playing along" with his mother's hallucinatory episodes.

Addendum May 23, 2017

A further point of literary structure. All of this is pretty much implicit in what I have said above but it has only recently struck me to put it in a clearer explicit statement. I think the whole is very structured: there is one core center of action, which is Howard and his wife, Madeleine, and he relates to all three personifications, and then you have three satellites (the friends), and they relate one-each. As Howard progresses (eventually speaks his daughter's name and condition and reunites with Madeleine), each friend progresses (Simon admits, first to death and then to his wife, that he is dying, Whit strikes a deal with love that he will fight for his daughter's affections, and Claire admits at least to time, whom she believes to be a human, her fears about not having a child). All very structured.