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"In seven days, God created the world. And in seven seconds, I shattered mine."

-- "Ben Thomas" (Will Smith)

I’ll start by saying that I can’t remember another time when I felt quite so emotionally manipulated as I was when I watched Gabriele Muccino's Seven Pounds (by a film, anyway). My friends tend to complain frequently about the overabundance of action movies in my DVD collection, and, in truth, I’m the last person they ever thought they would see cry at a "love story". But it happened -- I cried buckets in full view of them (pathetic or what?)

Seven Pounds, though, is a real love story. It's not a "real love story" like The Notebook claimed to be (that just induced my vomit), but a journey concerning one man’s sacrifice and redemption. It’s definitely not a feel-good movie in the sense that it leaves you feeling complacent, surrounded by a fantasy of sunshine and rainbows; rather, it’s filled with genuine passion, and is so expertly paced that it digs deep into even the most neglected hearts to find some form of sentimentality.

Will Smith plays "Ben Thomas", a mysterious IRS agent, who accidentally killed six strangers and his wife via a car crash; he now feels that he needs to visit specific people and help them in order to make amends for his actions. The first of these is a blind-meat-salesman named Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson), who Ben harasses to find out whether he is as good a man as he first thought he was and would warrant his help. Ben then visits a nursing home and threatens a supervisor for not giving an ill, elderly lady a bath; he also has various meetings with his long-term friend Dan (Barry Pepper), in which he constantly tells him to “Stick to the plan.” We don't find out what this means until later.

Now, for someone who doesn’t normally like this sort of movie, Will Smith did one hell of a job at grabbing my attention here. Rather ironically, though, Seven Pounds doesn’t start out as a "love story" at all; it actually starts off pretty damn weird. Ben, with no apparent motivation, checks himself into a dirty motel and buys a box jellyfish, and the audience is left wondering what the hell is happening. But after threatening to alienate the audience completely, things start making sense; Smith’s teasing performance as the unpredictable and relentless Ben draws us in to his private world and we start to become very intrigued by his character's motives (his performance ranks up there as his best, next to his work in The Pursuit of Happyness, Ali and Six Degrees of Separation).

It is when Ben runs into Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson, in an equally-as-touching performance) that things really become intimate. She is an isolated woman with a serious heart condition and could die anytime soon if she fails to find a donor. The two become close, but Smith’s character displays a certain amount of emotional complexity that we start to sympathise and want to discover more about him beyond his mysterious exterior. Seven Pounds is never corny; it’s fuelled with an incredible amount of character intensity, which makes you really anticipate the fate of the characters involved.

This is hardly a movie destined to uplift every one of its viewers, but it is one that has a profound effect, and I can only commend the direction, screenwriting and performances of the actors for that. I had an inkling that this was going to be a tearjerker and I was certainly proved correct (my friends will tell you) so it’s not like I was completely dissatisfied by this experience -- far from it, in fact. I consider crying good for the soul, and, truth be told, I consider Seven Pounds a very good movie, indeed.

(C) Andy Carrington, 2009.