Movie Review: Seven Pounds

Will Smith’s gripping but gap-filled “Seven Pounds” will have half your brain asking “How could this be?” and the other half saying, “Shut up and go along for the ride!” Listen to the latter voice.

Regular readers know that such lapses in logic drive me crazy. So I expected to groan at a film where Smith’s character meets a boy with cancer and spontaneously decides to give him healthy bone marrow.

(Take it from a member of the national marrow donor registry: The odds against such luck are astronomical.)

Director Gabriele Muccino hasn’t worked quite the same magic he did in “The Pursuit of Happyness,” because Grant Nieporte’s screenplay defies belief a few times too often. Yet so heartfelt is the emotion, so valuable the message, that the tale sweeps away doubt and leaves you in a kind of appreciative daze.

The film opens with a man called Ben Thomas (Smith) sitting in a bathtub and calling 911 to report a suicide in his hotel room. When asked who the victim is, he replies “I am.” You spend the rest of the film wondering whether a big studio would promote a movie in which Smith’s character kills himself – well, for any reason less valid than saving humankind – and, if not, how the filmmakers will get past what seems like an inevitability.

That’s all I’m going to say about the plot, except for one other thing: Thomas intervenes in the lives of complete strangers to atone for a terrible mistake he made. Though you’ll probably figure out his rationale halfway through, the movie sustains suspense long enough that I don’t want to give anything else away.

The cast has been well chosen. Rosario Dawson makes perfect sense as his love interest; she’s an actress who always seems as if she’s holding something back from us, and this role gives her a reason to be a bit hesitant or secretive.

Woody Harrelson, showing a sweetness we haven’t seen from him in years, plays an unflappable seller of frozen steaks. (The movie has a strong vegetarian agenda: Harrelson’s character doesn’t eat his own product, Dawson’s eats no meat at all, and the word “vegan” is prominently shown behind Smith on a hospital chalkboard.)

Watching Thomas agonize over life-and-death choices, it’s startling to realize Smith hasn’t done a comic character in almost four years, since “Hitch” came out for Valentine’s Day 2005. (He told me in our interview that his scouts are seeking an outright comedy for the near future.)

He has spent the last few years playing men who realize, often for the first time, that they’re going to die, and the day may come sooner than they’d planned. In an older actor, that might seem like morbidity. For Smith, who turned 40 in September, it’s more like a realization that the second half of life brings a different set of burdens, responsibilities and joys.

He’s also one of the few middle-aged actors who keep trying to step away from the things that are easiest for them. His popularity transcends ages, races, genders and nationalities, so he has the clout to make any film he likes. He gets my thanks for embarking on projects, however flawed, that take emotional risks.