Frustrating Seven Pounds Breaks the Scale
Seven Pounds is giving me fits. Maudlin, incredibly self-important and ultimately delivering a denouement that’s head-scratching, nonetheless this picture is so well made, and so beautifully acted by Will Smith, that hating it for its numerous flaws proves to be surprisingly difficult. All that being the case, please forgive me if I try all the same, the picture driving me a bit more crazy then I almost care to admit.
Will Smith contemplates the past in Columbia Pictures' Seven Pounds
Ben Thomas (Smith) has a plan. The IRS agent is tracking down seven strangers, people in need of assistance, and if they can prove to him they’re worthy he’s going to make sure they get it. Their needs are all over the map; financial, physical, medical and interpersonal problems keeping all of them from reaching their full potential. Ben wants to see them get there, his reasons for doing so are not any of the ones anyone would probably suspect.
Not that he’s going to reveal them. Even young, sexy cardiac patient Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson) can’t break through the wall this strange, highly emotional man has built up around himself. She does, however, get him to rethink his plan, his growing infatuation – maybe even love – for her forcing him to wonder if the price he thinks is required for redemption is actually worthy of the cost.
Why he needs redemption isn’t really too hard to figure out, and even though the studio and the publicists (as well as the production notes) want me to go out of my to not reveal the mystery the simple fact is audiences are going to have it solved almost immediately. The funny thing is, that’s fine, I actually think Ben’s plan of action is fairly intriguing, and if some of the same things that happen to him had happened to me I can’t say I wouldn’t ponder (on some far more minute level) many of the very same things.
What I do take issue with is the ultimate place director Gabriele Muccino (who helped steer Smith to an Oscar nomination for The Pursuit of Happyness) and neophyte writer Grant Nieporte choose to go. The unmistakable fact here is that the climactic stretch makes zero in the way of sense. More, I can’t remotely figure out what it is I was supposed to take away from all of this. Is Ben some sort of saint? Does he deserve our applause? Shall we reward him for his self-sacrificing behavior?
Sorry, but that’s just one bandwagon I just can’t get on. Personally, I think Ben’s final choices show a nihilistic defeatist narcissism impossible to embrace. Pain is one thing, remorse another, deep, unfathomable inability to forgive one’s self on a different plain altogether, and while I think all of us can relate to each of those three things just because that’s true doesn’t mean we want to let them rule our lives.
But that is exactly what this man does. His profound inability to pardon himself, his refusal to ask for help, fuels a bizarre mentally ill quest that’s downright depressing. This is a sad man, a figure whittled down to the very nub of who he was, any promise of greatness he once might have possessed bottled away never to be heard from again. He is, in many ways, the walking dead, a George A. Romero zombie looking to eat, not the flesh of others, but instead the meat covering his very own skeleton.
Yet Muccino and Nieporte apparently want to celebrate this fact. They paint Ben’s sacrifices as noble and just, almost as if what it is he’s giving up isn’t all that important when considered against his own mistakes and coupled with the second chances he’s graciously giving others. It is as if they feel his anguish is its own form of catharsis, choosing to ignore much of the finality of these decisions and the way they allow him to not actually take responsibility for what it is he’s horrifically done.
The flipside to all this is that, unlike say a hack director like Tom Shadyac (he made the unforgivable Patch Adams, after all), Muccino is a fabulous craftsman who uses restraint and subtlety when painting his brushstrokes. He also has an uncanny ability to get the very best out of Smith, the filmmaker managing to mine his actor’s depths in ways so many others (save maybe Michael Mann) haven’t even come close to replicating.
All of which makes the movie almost viciously easy to watch. Beautifully shot by Philippe Le Sourd (A Good Year) and magnificently edited by Hughes Winborne (The Great Debaters), Muccino weaves a magnetic web, and even when Nieporte’s script sinks into tedious pabulum there is still this almost eerie sense something wondrous and magical could be right around the very next corner.
That magic isn’t there, however, and what is onscreen carries about as much weight as a swift kick to the head. The whole thing builds to such an infuriatingly contradictory coda finding something to hang on to that could even be relatively construed as worthwhile is more or less impossible. Seven pounds could be the weight of the human heart, or maybe it coincides with mass of the souls Ben is looking to save. Whatever it is, all I know is that Seven Pounds the movie drove me crazy, and if I put my disappointment on a scale there’s a good chance it might be so heavy it would break it.
- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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