Review: Seven Pounds

"Seven Pounds" is quite possibly the most perfect example I've ever seen of how melodrama, however heavy-handed, can work when placed in the right hands. Leave it to Will Smith, the world's most infinitely likable actor (Tom Hanks lost the right to that claim after "The DaVinci Code") and the creative team behind Smith's last heavy-handed Oscar bid, "The Pursuit of Happyness," to get it right on the second go-around.

Allow me to clear up the plot through the incredibly frustrating, vague trailers. Ben Thomas (Smith) is an IRS agent, who at the very beginning of the film calls in his own suicide. The film then jumps back an unknown length of time, to Ben selling off all his possessions and endlessly perusing lists of names, shouting them at himself repeatedly. He calls a blind phone salesman (Woody Harrelson) and cruelly berates him. He creepily tails Emily (Rosario Dawson) in a hospital before informing her she's being audited, only to then tell her that he's going to make sure she is out of the reach of the IRS for half a year, in order to help her pay off her medical debts.

Through this, and a number of equally odd episodes, Ben seems to be flying on an entirely different plane. He seems vicious at times, aloof at others, but the one constant is that he is perpetually depressed. Smith, to his credit, conveys this without one line of the script to help him. We see brief flashes of something horrifying that happened to Ben, but are not told just what this is until the very end of the film. He appears to be on the verge of giving up and dying, but something compels him to complete the series of goals he keeps obliquely referencing.

Then, a complication ensues: Ben falls for Emily, and she for him, even though he only intended to meet her as part of his suicidal endgame, whatever that may be. Because of this, he forces her along with him on his emotional roller coaster; he leads her on with hints at his broken heart, but whenever she begins to care enough to try and understand him, he forces her back to an arm's-length away. Despite this, they grow closer, even though Emily admits she is on the verge of dying and Ben knows he will be as well, though for wholly different reasons.

It's pretty easy to see why this film wasn't an easy sell for Columbia, because there's no real genre or central story to lump it into. The film is at once a tender, subtle romance that moves at an almost indie movie-style pace, and a journey towards death reminiscent of Nicolas Cage's in "Leaving Las Vegas." All the while, we are pulled in, wanting to know what drove Ben to this point and just what he has in mind. And when we finally find out....well, I can't give it away conscionably, but just let me say that the film ends with one of the most surreal sequences since the frog downpour in "Magnolia." It's not as out-of-left-field as that film, given that here the eventual end is hinted at earlier on, but it's no less affecting. This film will likely go down as one of the year's buried treasures, because it's affecting in a way that doesn't resonate instantly. It takes time to really understand how beautiful the final revelation is.