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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Seven Pounds

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#1 of 1 Posted 12/16/08 3:52 PM

From harveykarten Posts 744 Last Nov-19
To All [Msg # 23642.1 ]

SEVEN POUNDS

Columbia Pictures
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: C
Directed by: Gabriele Muccino
Written By: Grant Nieporte
Cast: Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy, Barry Pepper
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 12/16/08
Opens: December 19, 2008

Christmas movies are here, many of them cynical comedies as befits our cynical times. Yet Christmas is also a time for giving. Getting back to our jaundiced times, however, do you wonder about the people who have extended themselves to you by contributing presents so different from the usual, with so much of the giver’s own time and life behind the offering? What is your benefactor is someone you do not know, or perhaps have met once or twice? Now you’re really suspicious.

Such are the characters that populate Will Smith’s latest movie, with Smith acting in the most downer role of his career. As Ben Thomas, an Internal Revenue Service agent who seems to have a lot of time on his hands especially in a year that our country needs to dig deeply into the pockets of folks who are not quite honest, Ben is the opposite of what you expect from the folks at the I.R.S. He’s not taking, except in one case of a bad guy who runs a hospital as though it were a used car lot. He’s giving, but there’s one condition: the people to whom he donates his services must be good guys—which, again, in our cynical age, seems to be a Sisyphean task.

Holiday season or not, “Seven Pounds” turns out to be not only sappy, which is OK: sometimes we get the blues and we need something sweet. It’s convoluted, a simple story told by scripter Grant Nieporte and directed by Gabriele Muccino (“The Pursuit of Happyness”) as though a tale well told and comprehensible would be too simple a task for the month that prestigious films are all the thing to do.

Pitched as a gripping mystery and surprising love story which asks questions about life and death, regret and forgiveness, “Seven Pounds” gives us Ben Thomas (Will Smith) as a fellow who for reasons that may be clear early on, has become an emotional basket case. While showing exaggerated charm, unusual for an I.R.S. man, his smile is superficial, until he meets someone who recharges his batteries in the person of Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson). Emily has been in and out of hospitals, afflicted with a failing heart, now given just a few weeks to live. When confronted by agent Thomas for being derelict in her tax payments, she at first is justifiably suspicious since he appears to be stalking her. As she gets to know him she figures the best use of her remaining days would be to spend quite a bit of time with the new love in her life.

Thomas, though has a plan to help others in a way that we in the audience are not privy to. He is determined to pay it forward to a blind pianist, Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), a physically abused woman, an associate in a children’s welfare agency, a sick child in a hospital, and others. He must first be sure that each of them is a good person.

The title becomes comprehensible only near the film’s conclusion, yet some of us in the audience will figure out the game as early as the opening scenes while others, perhaps only those not paying attention, might be even blown away by the blockbuster finale. Will Smith’s performance is engaging, as expected, but the film is weighed down by director Muccino’s shameless manipulation of our emotions and knotty storytelling.

Rated PG-13. 120 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Seven Pounds

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