It is not what a story is about, but how is it about it. I could summarize the plot of Seven Pounds for you in a paragraph and you’d be rolling your eyes or laughing. Or scolding me for suggesting that you’d roll your eyes or laugh. If you lapped up The Pursuit of Happyness (which I didn’t), this movie’s for you.

And yet I liked Seven Pounds, because it doesn’t reveal its plot as you would in a summary. It begins with its protagonist, Ben Thomas (Will Smith) phoning an ambulance and announcing his suicide. Then it pulls back and we see bits and pieces of Thomas’s former life: he had a high-powered job, a gorgeous house, a beautiful wife and, for reasons that won’t be clear until the end, apparently ditched his former profession to become an IRS agent. As you probably know from seeing the trailers or reading the summaries, he takes it upon himself to change the lives of seven people, most notably a heart disease patient named Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson). The why is easy to guess. The how is a little more tricky.

In its way, the film is ingenious as it presents a protagonist who knows exactly what he is doing and why he is doing it, even though his actions appear random and sometimes cruel. That we do not understand until the end makes a certain sense; as another critic said, Thomas (and his best friend, a lawyer played by Barry Pepper) already knows what he’s doing, and has no reason to explain why.

The dramatic reason, of course, is director Gabriele Muccino (who also directed The Pursuit of Happyness) wants us to sympathize with Thomas before the Big Reveal, in which case we accept his actions rather than rolling our eyes at him.

A certain breed of critic will dismiss the film as crassly manipulative. I am not that breed of critic.






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