Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Enigmatic redemption

After seeing “Seven Pounds,” it’s clear why a film starring Will Smith would have flown so far under the radar ahead of its opening: Ignorance of what it’s really about is directly proportional to the bliss of its heart-wrenching payoff.

Working for the second time with director Gabriele Muccino, with whom he collaborated on 2006’s “The Pursuit of Happyness,” Smith again has created an earnest and compelling film but one that defies easy description.

It opens with a closeup on Ben Thomas (Smith), an IRS tax collector in Los Angeles, calling 911 to report a suicide.

“Who is the victim, sir?” the dispatcher asks.

“I am,” Ben replies, burying his face in his hands.

And then we go back a while to see what led Ben to this time and place. Writer Grant Nieportes approaches the tale — propelled in part by jagged flashbacks that endlessly roll and loop on each other — almost like a shattered puzzle.

Rarely has a film hidden its intentions deeper, and longer, than this one. For the first 100 of its 120 minutes, it seems nothing more than disjointed threads involving Ben warily circling various strangers whose names he has mysteriously highlighted on his IRS printout sheets.

Among them are a blind, soft-spoken telemarketer (Woody Harrelson); a Hispanic mother (Connie Tepos) being battered by her boyfriend; and Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson), a young woman with congestive heart failure. Her condition is not quite serious enough yet to push her to the top of the donor list, so she struggles along wondering if each breath will be her last.

Whatever Ben’s mission is, it is brought to a halt by the sweetly sensitive Emily, who knows her time is running out. He finds himself torn over her — one part wanting to flee, the other wanting to stay close to her fading flame.

At regular intervals, Muccino drops tantalizing hints into the mix about what’s going on, some of them haunting. In one, Ben is in closeup, face-down on his bed, when a partly obscured woman rises behind him and traces her hands and fingers along his ear and neck. Then she recedes to the other side of the bed and melts into the comforter — and the camera pulls overhead to show Ben alone.

Yes, that woman is a memory, one that is central to the story, which by this point clearly has become one of redemption. But few redemptions come laced with as much tragic weight — both physical and emotional — as this.

And only in its last moments does it all come together.

Does it work? Well, some will find it overly sentimental hooey; others will gripe about that and the languid, quiet, deliberate pace. But many, hopefully, will embrace its moral and ethical questions while savoring the intensity of Smith and Dawson, who turn their too-brief affair of the heart into one of the most memorable screen relationships of the year.

The greatest actors are thinking actors, and Smith serves up powerfully thoughtful work as a man whose sins may be too big for him to let go of.

Global megastars of Smith’s stature often shy away from working this kind of material because it can be difficult for them to sell. But Smith does it easily, and to profoundly moving effect, in “Seven Pounds.”