SEVEN POUNDS is an ambitious film tripped up by its execution. Full of noble intent, and the brave choice to (mostly) eschew sticky sentimentality in favor of a more clinical approach to the issue of a man obsessed with death, alas, the result is a film that is for the first three-quarters of its running time is a diffuse and disjointed effort without enough of anything to pull it all together. By the time the story sorts itself out and does pull itself together, it is to wallow in exactly the sort of sticky sentimentality it was avoiding, and to become a gloppy exercise in excess of the worst variety. If it weren’t for Will Smith, it would be a total loss.
He plays Ben Thomas, an IRS agent with a dark past, more than a few demons, and a Diogenes-like mission to find people who are truly good. While the ancient Greek with a lamp was only looking for one honest man, Ben has set himself more difficult task of looking for as many good people as he can find in order to do them a good turn. Or as good a turn as showing up, announcing that they are being audited, and then offering them an extension to pay up their back taxes can be. These are not necessarily people who are in a position to benefit greatly from an extension, either. Take Emily (Rosario Dawson), for example. She has crushing medical bills, a failing heart, and a printing business that’s on hold. Ben, though mourning the mysterious woman who appears in his flashbacks, is charmed by Emily. She is charmed by him. It’s a relationship with doomed written all over it.
Not everyone he contacts knows he’s with the IRS, though he uses the IRS database to find them. The blind man (Woody Harelson) he harangues over the phone at his job taking orders for a meat company, bears the brunt of Ben’s fury without knowing why he’s being verbally pummeled. Neither does the audience. It’s another random scene that will, eventually, go somewhere, but so distasteful to bear that it’s doesn’t make up for the pain.
The direction is dispassionate; the camera is almost a disinterested third party about to move on to something more engaging. It makes for a cold film about ravaged emotions and the juxtaposition is one that is irritating. For a film about a man trying to redeem his soul, there is little soul to be found within it except for Smith’s performance. This is a man capable of projecting the deep-seated angst of Ben’s very troubled soul, and what warmth there is to be found is in that smile doesn’t quite get to his haunted eyes, as well as with the heat of his tears, his yelling, and his running at top speed through a rare Los Angeles rainstorm.
There is, perhaps, a metaphor is Ben’s choice of pet, a box jellyfish that is aethereal, deadly, and even more dispassionately cold-blooded than the film in which they both find themselves. Whatever it is, it’s more obvious than the SEVEN POUNDS of the title, which, this humble correspondent is reliably informed, refers to the pound of flesh awarded to a plaintiff in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and multiplied by seven in order to cover the beneficiaries of Ben’s largesse. While the reference isn’t obvious, that very fact sums up the film: oblique, unfocused, and more puzzling than illuminating.
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