Seven Pounds (**½)

Directed by: Gabriele Muccino
Starring: Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, Barry Pepper, Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy
Seen: February 15th 2009

**½ Out of ****

For the first half of this film the viewer does nothing but try to figure out what’s really going on. The movie starts very dramatically with a 911 call from Ben Thomas (Smith) reporting a suicide, his own. And then we switch back to some earlier time.

Ben Thomas is an IRA agent, and all we get to see is this him visiting with/hunting down several taxpayers who are in arrears. When he visits the head resident of a mental hospital to find out about his taxes, we see him and the doctor getting along quite amicably, and he tells the doctor he will consider his case. Then he goes to see one of the patients and he asks her whether the doctor is a good man or not. When the client says no, Ben almost assaults the man, telling him he is done with.

And so Ben continues to look for people, sometimes sneaking around, sometimes blatantly confronting them in a very offensive way. Why does Ben look for people? I won’t tell you, but I will tell you that guilt can eat someone alive, make a person believe the strangest versions of reality.

One of the people Ben meets on his journey is Emily Posa (Dawson), a woman suffering from a debilitating heart condition, who is also far behind on her taxes. Initially he becomes downright defensive when she asks him about his life, but something in her gets to him, and he falls for her as he sees more of her. The love story is actually quite touching here, and the viewer genuinely feels for Emily in her situation.

The film would like to see itself as clever, and it is to a certain degree, but it’s also manipulative, in that the story does not twist as such, the major plot points are simply withheld until close to the end of the film – and there is a subtle difference here. In Fight Club Edward Norton’s character only realised the truth near the end of the film, and the same applies to Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth sense, which is why those films worked so well. Seven Pounds does not follow the same arch, instead predestined events are withheld from the viewer in an attempt to peak interest. The film did however touch me deeply, since the end product, which normally will be seen as selfless, here gets not really reduced, and also not fully adapted, into an act of self-redemption.