Seven Pounds

Add Gabriele Muccino (maker of ‘The Pursuit Of Happyness’) & Will Smith (star of ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’) – and you should be looking at another moving, heartwarming drama about struggles and redemption. They both thought so too. Unfortunately, maybe they got a little cocky and figured that they knew exactly how to touch the audiences with emotional tear-jerker scenes - who knows. But the resulting movie ‘Seven Pounds’, while heavy with emotional drama and loss, is a little too smug for its own good.

I had read a preview of the movie before watching the movie, so I knew what was the general plot. Bad decision maybe, but its now become a practice. However, as I started to watch Seven Pounds, I realized that if I didn’t know the summary, understanding the story would be quite difficult ! The movie appears quite disjoint initially and moves into flashbacks intermittently, in a confusing way. It was enough to irritate wifey (she hadn’t read the preview) – she wondered aloud what was going on !! However around the intermission, the story becomes somewhat clear.
So if you (the reader) havent watched the movie yet, take a call now if you want to read further :)

The title Seven Pounds is never explained in the movie. Someone suggested that it had some connection to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice – Shylock’s pound of flesh – but in Shakespeare’s version, a pound of flesh was not in return for a life. Google throws up conflicting answers as well. Basically nobody knows :)

Anyway, Seven Pounds opens with Ben Thomas (Will Smith), an IRS man on a mission. He is out investigating people with tax defaults, first an old-age-home doctor and then Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson), who has a congenital heart defect which can only be cured with a heart transplant. Ben freaks out on the doctor, but he befriends Emily and promises to help with her taxes. But you can see Ben is a disturbed man – he has a sadness on his face all the time – and his eyes tell us a story of troubled soul.

The movie then moves back and forth in flashes and you get tantalizing clues to the cause of this grief in Ben’s life. But its still not clear what Ben is trying to do – all his actions, including his conversations with his friend Dan, brother etc is very cryptic. All that you can make out that he has a definite motive – but he gives no clue as to what it is. Only in the second half do things become clearer – and the emotional tugging begins. I admit I did get a little moist in a few sequences – its difficult not to. But at the same time you cant shake off the feeling that this is deliberate - showing you the most pitiable stories and their final redemption, great sacrifices etc. And this is the downfall of the movie – nobody likes to be so obviously manipulated.

All the good things in this movie lie in Will Smith – he really has the charisma as well as the depth to carry off such a complex character. And his eyes really speak out in some sequences ... But all that goes waste when, you come out of the hall not feeling warm and fuzzy, but a little deceived