Seven Pounds Movie Review
Seven Pounds is a powerful, mysterious film, slow to reveal itself, but engaging all the way. In the opening minutes, we hear Will Smith’s character make a 911 call reporting a suicide – his own – before flashing back to a series of seemingly random, inconsistent, disconnected actions. He tells us that he has shattered his life, and we see he is troubled and hurt. A few dream sequences hint at the source of his demise, but we spend the bulk of the next two hours trying to figure out both what it was that shattered his life, and how it affects his resulting actions.
The worst thing I can say about the movie? The camera loves Wills Smith’s face too much. Whether showing his you-can-trust-me-I’m-a-good-guy smile, or his I’m-in-pain-but-a-good-guy-can-bear-it grimace, the movie attempts to tell too much of the story through the emotions playing on his face. Nothing wrong with the guy’s face, but there are other ways to express feeling and move the plot along. As a result, there seems to be some disconnect between the slick, MIT-educated aerospace engineer Smith and the wooden, Forest Gump-awkward Smith who becomes as an IRS agent looking for good people.
Because I heard several people talking about the title after the movie who totally missed it, I’ll give you some of the background. A “pound of flesh” is what Shylock, the money lender in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice requests and receives as surety for a loan he makes to the merchant Antonio. When the loan cannot be repaid, Shylock, who has been hurt and insulted by Antonio, insists upon literal fulfillment of the terms of the contract.
Nowadays, someone who insists upon having his “pound of flesh” cruelly demands the repayment of a debt, no matter how much suffering it will bring the debtor. In Seven Pounds, the main character is both debtor and debt collector, deadbeat and loan shark. And unlike those involved in the recent sub-prime credit collapse, he means to both pay and collect.
It isn’t until the final five minutes of the film that the whole thing comes together. Now, personally, I like stories that are told from the beginning, but I suppose that art is imitating life here – the only story we know from the beginning is our own, and everything else we ‘know’ is pieced together from what we see and hear as we go along. My worry here is that too many people will hear about the film and skip seeing it, thinking they have enough of those pieces to understand the conclusion. In the Internet Age, it’s pretty risky for a studio to think that early audiences won’t blab the conclusion.
What challenges does the movie present? It raises some powerful questions, questions that get to the core of our humanity: “Do you consider yourself a good person?” “How do you tell if someone is a good person?” ” What would be the impact of a life lived for the benefit of others?” ” How far would you go to atone for a mistake you made?” And, “What does it mean to love someone?”
“Greater love has no one than this…” If the raw emotion of this movie doesn’t kill you, it might make you a better person.
