This is the sort of movie that leaves you with too many questions. What, for instance, is up with Ben having a pet jellyfish? Why is he calling a blind telephone operator (Woody Harrelson) and mocking his sightlessness? Why, when Ben hangs up, does he weep a bit then beat his coffee table with an expensive-looking chair? Why, whenever he talks to his best friend (Barry Pepper), does the best friend fall to pieces? Why does Ben sign his beach house over to a Mexican family, move into a motel, and continue to stalk sickly Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson, looking her luscious self even at death's door)? How, if Ben is so suicidally depressed, does he still get his hair to have that perfect S-Curl sheen? (That's not easy to do when you want to live.) How does any of this relate to his work as an IRS agent? And most crucially: Seven pounds of what?
Amid all this, there are flashbacks to a time when Ben knew how to smile. Apparently, those were the days. Then Something Happened. Now he acts like the illegitimate child of Jeff Bridges in "Starman" and Della Reese on "Touched by an Angel." Everything is explained, but long after we're owed clarity of some kind. Or maybe the explanation is just underwhelming.
"Seven Pounds" is exasperating because it doesn't seem to know how exasperating all its ambiguity can be. The film's chronology has been decentralized so we don't really know where in time we are, and Gabriele Muccino directs the stuffing out of everything in the name of achieving the loping artiness you maybe recall from "Babel" and "21 Grams," two movies made in collaboration between director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga.
The script for "Seven Pounds" is by Grant Nieporte, whose credits include writing for the sitcoms "8 Simple Rules . . ." and "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch." Before banging out his first screenplay, he appears to have spent a weekend watching the tortured fruits of Inarritu and Arriaga's labor. "Seven Pounds" strives for similar unliftable heaviness but lacks even the grand ponderousness of an Inarritu-Arriaga production. The movie is a doorstop that thinks it's a statue.
