Pound for Pound

Seven Pounds

by Cindy Fuchs

There will be no lovelier image on this season's movie screens than Rosario Dawson walking a black and white spotted Great Dane. As Duke the dog galumphs and tugs eagerly at his leash, Dawson's Emily smiles: her face radiant, her whole being given over to the majesty and pleasure of her pooch. The moment is brief. Just after Emily compliments her neighbor on her garden, she gasps for breath, lets go the leash and collapses.

This scene exemplifies the general rhythm of Seven Pounds: shots of pretty people in charming places give way to high drama, marked by worrisome music and the camera's movement up and out. Characters are linked by their interactions with Ben (Will Smith), a lonely, self-punishing IRS auditor. Or so he seems. It's plain from the start of the movie that Ben has more on his mind than back taxes, as his first words are his announcement to a 911 operator that he is about to commit suicide. The rest is essentially a flashback, explaining how he came to this dire point, as well as how he came to meet Emily.

He first spots her in a hospital, where she is looking frail and sad, and, sleeping fitfully in her bed, only barely aware that Ben is watching her from a shadowy corner. Ben's ability to move in and out of Emily's life is simply creepy at first, but as he appears to be hovering over other folks, as well, it's insidious. This even though he appears mostly pleasant — in that Will Smithy way.

His relationship with Emily becomes increasingly complicated — precisely because it turns tender. His first effort to befriend her is clumsy: He feeds Duke a big fat steak, only to learn that the dog's diet is limited to steamed broccoli and tofu ("He's a vegetarian!" Emily protests). Ben finds Emily as irresistible as the rest of us, so that when she admits to having congenital heart failure (a detail he has already researched) and he promises to ease up on the potential collecting of the $57,000 she owes, they are exchanging sweet smiles and charming murmurs.

Their romance will be gummed up by Ben's trajectory back to that first scene, as well as a supremely faulty logic in his efforts to find what he sees as redemption for a past perceived sin. His interviews with various potential gift recipients reveal his righteous anger as he determines who truly "deserves" what he has to offer. That Emily is worthy is to her credit, but the elaborate means Ben undertakes to deliver his favors are so illogical and essentially cruel that the movie, directed by The Pursuit of Happyness' Gabriele Muccino, soon turns from an intriguing investigation of morality and grief into an exercise in maudlin excess.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)