The Pursuit Of Sappyness

[December 17th, 2008]

Two scenes act as preamble to the opening titles of Seven Pounds, and they both showcase Will Smith making sorrowful phone calls. In the first, he dials 9-1-1 and tearily reports a suicide in a motel room. Who is the victim? asks the dispatcher. “Me,” Smith groans. On this Jim Croce-worthy note, we flash back to another call, in which Smith verbally assaults a mail-order-meats telemarketer (Woody Harrelson), first insulting the quality of the man’s pork, then the merit of his life: “You’re a blind vegan virgin.” Then he cries again.

These are the only two scenes in the whole of Seven Pounds that I can discuss without spilling some metal polish on the rusty beartrap that is director Gabriele Muccino’s project, but these two are enough: They establish that Will Smith will continue in the vein of his last three movies—The Pursuit of Happyness (also directed by Muccino), I Am Legend and Hancock—by maintaining a clenched, anguished, clotted expression on his face. Will Smith has completed his transfiguration into the Fresh Prince of Airlessness.

“It is said that in seven days, God created the world,” Smith says in an opening seashore monologue. “It took me seven seconds to shatter mine.” It takes the tandem of Smith and Muccino 118 minutes to present the worst movie of the year. From here out, I’m afraid this review will contain copious and exhaustive spoilers—but then the whole of Seven Pounds is a spoiler, ruining enjoyment, logic and eventually the will to live, or at least the will to see movies.

Smith plays Ben Thomas, a former aerospace engineer with a wrenching secret: He admired the newly purchased diamond ring on his wife’s finger for a moment too long, and subsequently plowed his roadster into an oncoming minivan, killing his beloved and a family of six. (The sequence would make a fine, if abridged, commercial for Jared the Galleria of Jewelry: “He went to Jared? He went to…” WHUMP.) After a suitable period of despairing, Ben hatches a plan: He vows to impersonate an IRS agent, find seven “good people” deserving of a fresh start, and—this is your last warning—donate his vital organs to them. Yes. That is his plan. As a form of karmic restitution, Ben’s method lacks the moral symmetry of Schindler’s List or even My Name Is Earl, but it has the advantage that Ben will be dead before anybody notices.

He starts with the slightly less vital organs: A serving of liver, a half-rack of lung, and his opulent beach house, which is not, strictly speaking, an organ at all, and certainly weighs more than seven pounds. But the second stage of the operation is complicated when Smith falls in love with Emily (Rosario Dawson), the cardiomyopathic woman to whom he plans to bequeath his heart. (There might be a metaphor here.) They go on dates, they argue over his uncommunicative personality, they make love—very gently, one suspects, since Emily has previously been rushed to the hospital after the exertion of walking her dog. Ben is wracked with indecision.

Then he kills himself. With a jellyfish. (It is, the movie informs us, a box jellyfish, “the deadliest jellyfish in the world.”) He slides into a bathtub full of ice—though not before leaving a considerate note to inform the EMTs that as they harvest his organs they should keep an eye out for the venomous jellyfish in the tub—and he dumps the critter in, clutching the porcelain, grimacing in toxic spasms. And that’s the end of the movie, except for a soothing coda in which Rosario Dawson bumps into Woody Harrelson in the park and realizes that while she has Ben’s heart, Woody has Ben’s eyes.

It is possible that, by recounting this ludicrous series of events, I have given you the wrong impression. Perhaps you have inferred that Seven Pounds is a campy, fun disaster. You are mistaken. Seven Pounds is agonizing, incessant and impervious to irony. Its secrets are apparent after, oh, 20 minutes, and from there the movie soldiers resolutely on: Like its hero, it wants to die, and it will take you with it.