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Seven Pounds
No, it’s not the price of your ticket. Actually, even after seeing Will Smith’s new movie I’m not entirely sure what the title refers to. And even if I knew, I probably couldn’t tell you. See, Seven Pounds is an enigma wrapped around a secret. It’s not a suspense thriller, but if you knew the sting in the tail there really wouldn’t be much to keep you occupied while this slow, turgid tearjerker unfolds. All of which makes it a little tricky to write about, but I’ll keep spoilers to a minimum. Smith plays Ben Thomas. He’s a suicidal tax auditor, apparently, though he also seems to be a rogue agent, operating without any oversight that we can see. He picks his own targets and picks on them too. Putting in a phone call to customer service telephonist Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson) Ben comes on like a real asshole. Will Smith making fun of a blind man? Whatever next? He talks tough to a doctor who runs a care home for the elderly. Then persuades a welfare officer to give him the address of a Latin woman trapped in an abusive relationship (Elpida Carillo – remember her from Salvador and Predator?). Who is this guy and what game is he running?
Things don’t get much clearer when he turns his attention to Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson), a woman who's getting in debt trying to meet her medical bills and waiting on a heart transplant operation. She may have just months to live, but does that mean she doesn’t need to file her taxes? Ben decides to cut her some slack and a relationship starts to develop, albeit stalled by the bewildering mixed signals he keeps giving out. Director Gabriele Muccino directed Smith in The Pursuit Of Happyness, and if you found that movie manipulative you ain’t seen nothing yet. Flashbacks tease out Ben’s motivation, but quite what he has in mind emerges late in the day… At which point many people will be calling for a reality check. I have to confess I’d checked out well before then – in part because I had a strong hunch where it was heading (correctly as it turned out), and in part because Muccino keeps hitting bum notes. Earnest and trite, the movie feels painfully contrived and airless. There’s none of the dirty realism that served as such an effective counterpoint to the fairytale elements in Pursuit of Happyness.
Usually so personable on screen, Smith feels cruelly constrained by the necessity of keeping his character so ambiguous. His instinct seems to be to play God with other people’s lives, but at the same time to keep them at arm’s length. We can’t quite trust Ben, so it becomes impossible to warm to him. If the film has a saving grace it’s Rosario Dawson, an actress who seems more alive than anyone else on screen, no matter that her character has a terminal heart condition. But even Dawson can’t redeem a parable built out of treacle, sanctimoniousness and sentimental pop tunes. Tom Charity Titles related to this articleRelated/similar articles
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