Seven
With Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Richard Roundtree, R. Lee Ermey, John McGinley, Julie Araskog, Mark Boone Junior, and Kevin Spacey.
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I’d ascribe at least part of this taste to the current inability to believe in or try to effect political change–a form of paralysis that in America is related to an incapacity to accept that we’re no longer number one. (It’s a pity we can’t learn from the experience of the British, who had to cope with a similar problem some time ago; acceptance of our limitations might actually liberate us.) Within this context of denial, trash, decay, and apocalypse become very attractive–a kind of spiritual heroin. If everything is so terminally and beautifully hopeless–if evil is omnipresent and triumphant (as Seven so potently maintains) and mankind is incapable of climbing out of the primordial slime–then we’re let off the hook: we don’t need to assess who and where we are, what we should do, who’s running the show and why. The very capacity to observe violence and torture without flinching is often made to seem an index of world-weary sophistication and maturity–revealing a hip understanding of how rotten our world is and why we’re right to do as little as possible to change it.
Some reviewers have been calling the film hackneyed and implausible. I suppose they’re right about the plot, but their observations ignore what makes the movie a noteworthy achievement, which is almost entirely a matter of stylistic freshness and conviction, the special look and feel of certain actors and sets. (Morgan Freeman as a weary moral witness, for example, a burned-out police detective on the verge of retirement who suffers from insomnia. Or the cavernous gutted urban apartment with hundreds of air fresheners hanging from the high ceiling and a tortured, still-breathing human skeleton under a bedcover.) Such criticism doesn’t take into account the excitement of the opening credits sequence–a jerky, grainy, scratchy bit of experimental film that looks like prime Stan Brakhage, one of the most exhilarating stretches I’ve seen in a Hollywood picture all year. Certainly the press book didn’t lead me to expect anything special. Director David Fincher is best known for music videos (for Madonna and the Rolling Stones), TV commercials, and Alien3 (where a taste for sordid surroundings and religious fanaticism is also apparent). And the first-time screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, wrote the script while working as either a floor manager or a cashier (depending on which page of the press book you’re reading) at Tower Records in New York.
Apocalyptic jive is substituted for real-life horrors, which are felt to be both insufficient and irrelevant to the full-fledged hell incarnate Seven wants to convey. Social awareness gives way to metaphysics, and the movie’s touching, old-fashioned faith in the power of good to reassert itself (“I’ll be around,” says Somerset) runs neck and neck with the fashionable premise that martyred serial killers remain our truest holy men. In other words, for all its power, Seven remains first and last a stylistic exercise, and its message, like most messages nowadays, is to remain exactly where we are.
