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"Seven Pounds," now on DVD, is worth catching

Cinema has seasons, just like baseball and football. Qualifying dates for the Academy Awards, the advent of the summer blockbuster season and prestigious film festivals affect the release dates of movies in the theaters and on DVD.

That’s a roundabout way of saying that we’re in post-Oscars DVD season. The films that scored big are just now in home release, which means I’m finally catching them. (People who don’t know how to behave in a civil manner have ruined moviegoing for me. I always walk out more annoyed than entertained by boors who insist on talking, picking ringtones on their cells and endlessly crumpling cellophane wrappers.)

Thanks to Netflix, my husband and I will catch up with films worth watching months after they’re in theaters. That’s why we only recently saw Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, The Wrestler and The Reader. We also saw Seven Pounds, a Will Smith movie that received no nominations, but that was more interesting than some of the big winners at the Oscars. (See the trailer here.)

We were disappointed with Slumdog Millionaire, which is actually a pretty depressing film along the lines of an ultra-grim Satyajit Ray drama sprinkled with child prostitution, torture, a kid covered in excrement and children blinded for profit than the “feel-good” film that critics and friends proclaimed it to be. Unless you count feeling good that the guy wins money on a quiz show or that everyone breaks into a nonsensical song in a train station at the end (how could I make that up?), then Slumdog Millionaire is actually a very feel-bad movie.

The Wrestler was a very good character study of a broken-down performer whose life is in tatters. There’s rough language, sexually-charged nudity and a head-banging metal score that won’t be to everyone’s taste. The script and the performances by Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei were excellent, as was the sense of entering a world more exotic than a fantasy kingdom in Lord of the Rings. The pity and disgust that we feel for Rourke’s character is very real throughout the film. And I loved those scenes of the aging wrestler working at the deli counter!

Performances also made The Reader, although I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone offended by nudity in films. There’s a lot of it, some very explicit, by Kate Winslet and David Kross, who had to wait to turn 18 before he could be filmed nude. Winslet plays an older woman who sleeps with a 15-year-old student while she hides her past as a concentration-camp guard. Their scenes are integral to the plot but, again, they’re explicit. The issues explored in The Reader are complex and thought-provoking:  it’s actually about the postwar generations in Germany and how they have dealt with the specter of Nazism.  

To a parochial school kid like me, Doubt had the most frightening villain since Dracula. Actually, it was Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, a holy terror of a school principal who opposes the efforts of a progressive priest to open the Church to the changes coming during Vatican II. (When I was 11, I feared nothing more than our parochial school principal, Sister Renee.) The film is essentially a two-character play with the principal and the priest warring over her suspicions that he has molested the only African-American student in the school. 

The film succeeds in sparking discussions of what concepts like “doubt” and “truth” actually mean. With rich performances and a literate script by its playwright, John Patrick Shanley, Doubt also vividly captures the look and feel of Catholic schools in New York during the 1960s, even down to the candy store near the school and the hissed “Sit up straight!” admonitions from nuns.

We were totally flummoxed when it came to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The film takes up hours you’ll never get back in your life. There was a lot of computer-generated trickery to age Brad Pitt backwards from birth as an old man to death as an infant and way too many flashbacks and flash-sideways.  (The latter is a funny term for confusing plots from Funny Farm, a goofy Chevy Chase comedy we love.) The aging of Pitt and the other actors is done with skill but, as my husband put it, “To what end?” There was nothing memorable about the film and not much beyond weirdness.

The film that we’ve enjoyed the most in recent weeks has been Seven Pounds, a very touching story that tackles big issues with more success than the overblown Benjamin Button. Will Smith plays an IRS agent who becomes a part of the lives of a gentle blind musician, a young woman with heart disease and several other characters who are ill. For most of its running time, the film is a mystery: We don’t know why the IRS agent cares about these people or how they figure into the plot.

(The film is more enjoyable if you don’t know anything about the plot; unfortunately, a snide reviewer from one the major dailies didn’t care for the film and he divulged one of the points in the story in a review I read. Watch the film not knowing much about it and you’ll enjoy it more.)

With patience, you discover the plan that the IRS agent has for the other characters and the reason for his quest. Along the way, there’s a sweet romance, redemption, sacrifice, soul-searching and the notion that one moment can change many lives. There was no foul language, no violence and a story that raised questions about life and death.

In fact, when a single act of mayhem occurs near the end, it’s shocking because it’s the only one like it. When we watch endless explosions, murders and shootings  in other films, we become innured to death and it becomes insignificant. In Seven Pounds, it’s never that.

The film didn’t score nominations at the Academy Awards, but it was an intelligent film for adults. That made it a prize winner in our book, whether the Academy agreed or not.