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Double-header review: ‘Seven Pounds’ and ‘Milk’
On the surface, Seven Pounds and Milk don’t seem to have much in common, but they share an unfortunate trait: both are well-intentioned movies that fail to match their lofty ambitions.
Seven Pounds reunites Will Smith with director Gabriele Muccino, who steered the actor to a Best Actor Oscar nomination in the touching The Pursuit of Happyness. To its credit, Seven Pounds treads very different ground. To its detriment, the movie keeps tripping itself.
Lurking somewhere within this confounding film is a truly unique story about a Good Samaritan named Ben (Smith) who randomly selects strangers to better their lives, and to atone for a devastating tragedy he caused. Frustratingly, Muccino and writer Grant Nieporte keep undermining the drama by trying too hard to turn their movie into some kind of parlor trick.
Seven Pounds leans far too heavily on The Great Twists, doing everything it can to knock the viewer off balance, from scrambling its chronology to offering only brief glimpses of the people Ben is trying to help. While I understand the need to maintain some air of mystery, the movie gets so carried away with trying to keep secrets, it doesn’t do enough to explain exactly who these people are and why we should care about them.
Smith valiantly pours his unfailing energy into his character, making Ben intriguing if not always empathetic. Rosario Dawson gives one of her best performances as the woman who becomes Ben’s most important beneficiary. Their scenes offer a glimpse of how good the movie could have been.
But not even their appeal can lift Seven Pounds out of its self-defeating quagmire. Its twists and turns are sometimes so off the wall, that Ben’s ultimate aim comes across not as moving, but pathetically weird and desperate. I wanted to like these characters more, but the obfuscating storytelling kept pushing me away.
When it comes to tear-jerkers, I’m notoriously easy. It takes only a few notes of the Schindler’s List theme to turn on my waterworks. The ultimate failure of Seven Pounds is that I didn’t shed a single tear over it.
GRADE: C
Milk review after the jump …
Sean Penn gives one of the very best performances of his career as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States.
I only wish the movie were as good as Penn.
For a filmmaker as innovative as Gus Van Sant, Milk often comes across as disappointingly ordinary and obvious. I didn’t expect the movie to be like one of the director’s more avant-garde films, e.g. Elephant, but I certainly expected better than a fairly standard biopic with a few solid performances.
Van Sant didn’t seem to know what kind of film to make. Is it an intimate portrayal of Milk’s life and loves? Is it a docudrama? Or is it a statement encouraging people that it’s OK to be gay? By trying to be all these things, the movie doesn’t especially work as any one of them.
The scenes about Milk’s private life are poorly developed. It sets up a potentially interesting relationship between Milk and Scott Smith (James Franco), his first lover in San Francisco, only to minimize Smith in favor of the more emotional but more off-putting Jack Lira (Diego Luna). Among the supporting players, only Emile Hirsch is truly memorable as Cleve Jones, who went on to create the AIDS quilt. Josh Brolin tries his best to create a nuanced portrayal of Dan White, the city supervisor who was often at odds with Milk, but the actor can’t rise above a two-dimensional part.
The movie does a better job of covering the momentous final year of Milk’s life, 1978, thanks to excellent photography and period detail, but even here the movie falters when Van Sant and rookie writer Dustin Lance Black rely too much on heavy-handed foreshadowing. Much of the movie comes across like the Cliffs Notes version of the excellent documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, with vultures circling overhead.
For all the film’s faults, it’s still well worth seeing for Penn alone. He brilliantly captures Milk’s canny intelligence and ingratiating charisma that could charm even a hostile crowd. Watching the actor, I could understand why millions idolize Milk. Penn offers a good look at the man, but only The Times of Harvey Milk provides a true understanding of his life. It may be that the less you know about Harvey Milk, the more compelling the new movie will seem.
Milk has drawn considerable praise from critics, but I fear they’re confusing the importance of its subject with the actual effectiveness of the filmmaking. Unfortunately, Van Sant has also confused importance with real insight. Penn buoys Milk up to a point, but it’s still a great performance in only a good movie.
GRADE: B
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Comments
By SRCputt
December 20, 2008 10:36 AM | Link to this
If you’ve seen The Times of Harvey Milk, you have a much better sense of who he was than Milk provides. I can’t really determine who this movie is for. If you are already familiar with Harvey Milk, the movie is redundant, with no new insights. If you are the slightest bit homophobic, the movie is so in your face about its gay subject it will turn people off. I have been surprised by the praise the film is getting. Penn will deserve his Oscar nomination. But basically the film is just preaching to the choir. I saw this right after Slumdog Millionaire. After that brush with greatness, it was clear to me Milk wasn’t close in quality.