Se7en
Nearly 20 years later, “Se7en” has a very different reputation than it did when it came out in 1995. Back then, it was a change of pace role for Brad Pitt, who had become a matinee idol after smoldering in “Interview With the Vampire” and “Legends of the Fall”; Morgan Freeman’s reputation was already solidified thanks to a career in great movies; Gwyneth Paltrow’s star was on the rise, and she was co-starring with her boyfriend at the time, Pitt; and the director, David Fincher, was coming off of a commercial and critical failure in “Alien3,” which saw the film taken from him in post by the studio. When it hit theatres, it got some strong reviews, which followed some brutal test screening scores, but still turned into one of the biggest hits of the Fall of that year. Now, it’s a major flash point in the careers of both Pitt and Fincher, prophesying the successes to come for both.
The story, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, is well-known by now: in a dark, dreary city, detectives Mills (Pitt) and Somerset (Freeman) are lead into an intense investigation after being sent to the scene of an obese man’s death. His feet and hands are bound together, and he’s face first in a plate of spaghetti. As Somerset continues investigating that, Mills is reassigned to the murder of a lawyer who is bled out. On the floor, in the lawyer’s blood, is the word “greed.” When he’s told about this, Somerset returns to the obese victim’s apartment, and sure enough, he finds the word, “gluttony,” on the wall. These murders are connected, representations of the Seven Deadly Sins. Somerset is a week away from retirement; needless to say, he doesn’t want to get involved with this case. And yet, he can’t turn away from it, either.
This is an uncompromising film in tone; by comparison, “The Silence of the Lambs” feels like a comedy. Yes, Walker’s script follows a lot of police procedural cliches, but the film is ultimately less about a mystery to be solved as it is a descent into Hell on Earth for our protagonists. Somerset is right to want nothing to do with this case: up until now, he thinks he’s seen it all, and doesn’t want something undone when he leave. More than that, he’s worn out with the job, and alone in the world; he came close to marriage once, but it never happened. Mills is the cocky newcomer, who deliberately came to this city because he wanted to do well. He has a wife (Tracy, Paltrow’s character), and they’re in love, but have very different views on coming here. He thinks he’s prepared for what he’ll face in this city, but from the outset of this case, we know he’s out of his depth. These characters are about to be tested psychologically in a way life has never tested them before, by a mind that cannot be conceived of in rational terms. And no, even after 19 years, I’m not going to reveal who the killer is. If you’ve seen it, you know, and you know why he was the perfect choice, and why it was an inspired choice at the time.
The same can be said for the director, and the stars. For Pitt, this was a pre-emptive attempt to head off being typecast as a pretty boy movie star, and with this and his Oscar-nominated performance in “12 Monkeys” opening months apart, Pitt succeeded masterfully. Watch the subtlety in which Pitt shows us Mills’s inability to read, and makes us feel his frustration when he’s trying to do some reading Somerset suggests, and can’t. It’s a matter of fact part of the character that allows Pitt to give us a great evolution in the character that leads to a moment when he and Somerset are at a bar, talking about the case, that finds the tables turned between the two, even if it’ll just be for a moment. As Somerset, Freeman does some of his very best work, which is saying something. Always projecting great intelligence, Freeman shows a profound sadness on Somerset’s face. He seems like he was probably a lot like Mills once, but life, and the job, wore him down. He’s seen too much to live normally, which would likely explain why he needs a metronome to sleep. There’s a pain deep within the character that we aren’t used to seeing out of Freeman, and the actor sells it so easily it seems like it should be a crime in and of itself. That pain comes through most devastatingly in the end, after the cycle of the killings has completed. The case is over, but there’s no happy ending in store. Somerset’s words have a finality to them, though, that is profound, and resonate long after we’ve finished watching the film.
As good as Pitt and Freeman and the rest of the cast (including Paltrow and R. Lee Erney) are, the real star of the film is director David Fincher, who made the first in a string of great, unsettling character studies when he made this film, and it hit theatres in 1995. Up next was “Fight Club,” which continues to polarize viewers, and still to come were the likes of “Zodiac” (a riveting true crime companion piece to “Se7en”), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Social Network,” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” “Se7en,” though, has aged hauntingly well. Yes, it follows the police procedural genre points to a “t,” but the dread Fincher and his collaborators (especially cinematography Darius Khondji and composer Howard Shore) bring to the film turns it into something truly unnerving. There’s not a lot of depth to the story on a narrative level, but the way it builds to it’s conclusion is stunning. When Mills, Somerset, and our killer are face-to-face near the end, and Mills and Somerset are doing their own forms of interrogation, we see them each trying to get to the bottom of what we’ve just been watching for the past 100 minutes. When it’s all on the table, after we finally hear it from the killer’s mouth, we get a glimpse of evil we rarely have ever had in modern cinema. Even with the superior “Zodiac” twelve years later, Fincher couldn’t top it. No one else has in American film.
