The Sunday Times (London)
January 7, 1996, Sunday
Serial thriller
Stephen Amidon
STEPHEN AMIDON is gripped by a desolate new film about a repeat murderer.
Serial killers are often the impresarios of the criminal world. While most other outlaws strive to remain anonymous, the repeat murderer frequently goes to elaborate lengths to create theatrical effects at the crime scene smearing bloody jeremiads on a bedroom wall, carefully posing his victims for the police photographer’s strobe. Indeed, the serial killer’s profession is eerily akin to that of the director, sharing both a meticulous care for significant detail and concern for audience reaction. As the pioneering FBI agent John Douglas (who served as the inspiration for the work of Thomas Harris) has pointed out, compulsive murderers often see their prey as little more than props for sending messages to the world. Little wonder, then, that the serial killer genre is so popular with young film-makers.
If mass murderers can be abominable showmen, then John Doe, the perp in Seven (18) proves to be a regular David O Selznick. His crime scenes are pieces of gruesome theatre that have been stage-managed down to the last detail. He even uses classical writers such as Dante, Chaucer and Milton to expand his theme: the seven deadly sins. His first victim, for instance, is a grotesquely obese man whose demise is fashioned as a critique on gluttony every bit as a trenchant as a Hogarth print. Found face-down in a bowl of spaghetti, he turns out to have been force-fed to death by the killer. For his second performance, appearing just a day later, Doe creates a stark parable of greed by slicing precisely one pound of flesh from the flank of a top lawyer. You might object to his means, but you have to admit that the guy has flair.
Sloth, lust and pride are similarly staged over the next three days, forcing the police in the movie’s nameless American metropolis to abandon traditional crime-solving strategies for some urgent literary criticism. The senior detective, William Somerset (played by the superb Morgan Freeman), decides to hit the library, cross-referencing footnotes instead of fingerprints. His headstrong young partner, David Mills (Brad Pitt), is reluctant to follow his boss’s lead, but after victims continue to be used as still-death models for Doe’s Inferno, he follows suit. (In a rare light touch, Mills has a uniform cop buy him schoolboy study guides so he doesn’t have to labour over the originals).
Despite this wealth of literary artifice, Seven is, in fact, a remarkably raw and profoundly unsettling film. It has been a long time since Hollywoode has released such a comprehensively bleak picture. Director David Fincher, whose last effort was the tenebrous Alien 3, has created the celluloid equivalent of a Bosch triptych. His crime scenes, with their gruesome detail, pulsating shadow and drained colour, are brief excursions to hell. At one site, hundreds of pine-tree-shaped air fresheners have been hung from the ceiling to mask the stench of death, creating a sort of Dantesque wood for the cops to get lost in. In another, a customised leather harness has been strapped to a prostitute’s client, causing him to eviscerate her while they engage in forced sex. The world view here is strictly medieval. The city is all darkness and shadow, pounded by continuous rain. The human body is portrayed as a fragile vessel even Pitt looks brittle and ashen. It is a world in which the Enlightenment has never happened.
Fincher’s bleak vision is matched by a script of equally uncompromising desolation. First-time writer Andrew Kevin Walker constantly subverts his chosen genres, adding to the viewer’s sense of disquiet and doom. Although Mills and Somerset at first seem to be your basic ill-matched partners (callow, white and reckless vs mature, black and sober), they quickly develop a tender, intuitive relationship that is nothing like the buddydom of Lethal Weapon. Their investigation, meanwhile, lacks the light bulb-over-the-head forensic breakthroughs of Manhunter or Silence of the Lambs. These cops are simply stumbling around in the film’s comprehensive darkness. And Walker’s ending, the most downbeat finale to a big American film in recent memory, has ”Producers Should Interfere Here” stamped all over it. The fact that they did not is remarkable. You have to wonder if he threatened them with one of those leather contraptions.
Indeed, it is only on those rare occasions when Walker and Fincher abandon their rigorously sombre agenda that the film rings hollow. There is a particularly clumsy meeting between Somerset and Mills’s wife (Gwyneth Paltrow), during which he plays the role of kindly uncle after she admits she’s pregnant. Coming amid all the horror, this piece of folksy wisdom seems about as fitting as an aerobics instructor showing up during the My Lai massacre. Later, Doe and Mills engage in a disquisition on the nature of evil that sounds as if it had been cribbed from one of those study guides. The film-makers are better at creating tableaux than placing explicatory panels beneath them.
These are minor faults, however, and only serve to point up the film’s overriding integrity, a quality that is bolstered by yet another remarkable performance by Freeman. The burnt-out cop is a dishearteningly familiar role, but Freeman makes us feel as if we are seeing this type of character for the first time. After 34 years on the force, his Somerset wants nothing more than to retire to a farm far away from mankind’s venality. He is, appropriately enough, a mere seven days from retirement when the first murder occurs. Once he begins fully to understand the magnitude of Doe’s crimes, he decides to stay on the job not, as one might expect, for a shot at redemption, but rather out of a sort of quietly appalled curiosity as to just how depraved humankind can be. This, he realises, is something new, something even his benumbed mind could not have anticipated. A lesser actor would have made a seven-course meal out of this, but Freeman maintains a solid core of dignified humanity throughout. He sees the worst that man has to offer, realises there is no explaining it, and yet still finds a way to get out of bed in the morning. It is rare and strangely gratifying to identify with a hero who disagrees with Hemingway’s dictum that ”the world is a fine place” yet still manages to endorse his assertion that it is ”worth fighting for”.
Pitt’s performance is also effective, though for different reasons. Though he begins the film full of macho tics and winning mannerisms, his crowd-pleasing charm is swallowed by the film’s murk like a teddy bear sinking in quicksand. Outclassed by John Doe within the story and Freeman outside it, Pitt gradually assumes a wounded, out-of-control quality that serves the film’s purposes well. That $10m smile is knocked right off his face, leaving him bereft and truly vulnerable. In a real way, Brad Pitt is David Mills. It’s the best thing to happen to him in a long time.
For all its undoubted virtues, it is difficult in the end to know just what to make of Seven. If you can accept its misanthropic premise and stylised gloom, it is a uniquely harrowing film. The few blossomings of hope that Fincher lets sprout are quickly trampled underfoot, while the ending’s spasm of rough justice provides no catharsis whatsoever. In other words, it is just the sort of movie nobody with any money is supposed to want to make. And yet it has grossed more than $100m in America so far. Does this mean that we are in for a new nihilism, complete with unredeemed gruesomeness and downbeat endings? I hope not. Seven derives its unique power from standing in contrast to everything else on screen these days. Better to let it remain a brilliant one-off, something as grisly, rare and compelling as a serial killer’s crime scene.
