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"Se7en": Thirty Years Later

 "Se7en" is a mixed bag, but it's a movie I really like. It's structurally inventive.


Someone is murdering civilians; the murders take unusual forms. An overweight man is forced to eat pasta until he dies; this is, almost literally, the punishment given to Big Anthony in the "Strega Nona" picture book. A cunning lawyer dies after having sawed off a pound of his own flesh; this act is not "gluttonous," it's not its predecessor; it's an act that is meant to represent "greed."

Another man dies after having been chained to a bed for a year; his "sin" is sloth.

Then the script does something surprising. Detective Morgan Freeman finds the address of the killer. He does this by conducting a kind of library search to determine which "John Doe" has been raiding libraries for books about murder and books by Dante, Chaucer, Milton. This leads Freeman close to the killer--closer than he realizes--but it also does something important in terms of character development. In the effort to access the killer's files, Freeman's partner, Brad Pitt, shows himself as hot-headed. He will bend certain rules. This annoys Freeman--and it also foreshadows the events of the famous final scene of this movie.

The murders resume. Lust: someone mutilates a prostitute with a strap-on that is also a stiletto. Pride: a model chooses to die rather than to live without her nose. Morgan Freeman seems not to be making progress, but, suddenly, the killer just appears; he turns himself in. And the notorious Third Act begins.

What doesn't work: some of the overheated dialogue ("you bring a child into this world, you need to SPOIL THAT CHILD," "Ernest Hemingway said...." "you're just a slogan on a cereal box")....On the other hand, I have so much admiration for Morgan Freeman. It's plausible that he would "shut out" Brad Pitt in the early scenes. It's plausible that he would start to soften (in part because of Gwyneth Paltrow). And it's plausible that the final minutes in the abandoned fields would bring about an existential crisis (a crisis that the actor handles really well).

I always have time for this movie, and I wish that David Fincher would work at a speedier rate. I'm a fan.


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