Head in a box
Missed Christmas. Never made it to the end of the film. After seeing it pop up on my Amazon Prime for the hundredth time, today I did. Grateful now, not only that I’ve lived past the age of eighteen, but also that I’ve made it to the end of the film with the lenses I have on now versus then. I wouldn’t have appreciated it then in the way I did today. That December all those years ago, I streamed it with shit internet in my bunk bed on a granular Asus laptop. Today it was on a fifty inch flatscreen 4K television in the comfort of my own home. A thousand miles away from that bunk spiritually and truly. Different country, different setting, different person. I would have been there for the gore. Now all I could focus on was the aesthetics and lighting.
I am not typically analytical on a technical level when it comes to movies. I tend to focus on acting and set pieces instead of editing and lighting. For the most part, acting wasn’t something that even scratched my brain during the duration of the film and the sets were so flawless and full of life that I blended with the world rather than looked into it. Then at some point my viewership shifted from immersed in the world to dissecting it. Loud noises in the background and moments of interruption as comic relief felt fresh. Morgan Freeman’s character Somerset had a lot of light fixtures over and around his head. It felt like a nod to his illuminated or enlightened state with his years of experience, whereas Pitt had flat or nonexistent lighting around him to show his unguided ways. I found myself staring at Freeman’s surroundings to confirm my own suspicions as the film went on. If you’ve seen it and you didn’t notice this, give it a watch and let me know if you see it.
There’s something to be yearned for in the modern era of film. This maximalist grit and decay of the mid to late nineties is something we need to come back to. Boarded up windows, rain, noises in the background, smog. Fincher did it very well in Seven and Fight Club and Zodiac. American Gangster by Ridley Scott and Fallen by Greg Hoblit have similar grimy vibes- both of which star Denzel Washington. Unrelated to the main topic here, but Fallen is in a way a spiritual successor to Seven in the sense that we deal with serial murders with demonic/Biblical overtones. Even the bad guy- Azazel- is a bald white man in his thirties with an odd personality.
Seven is over thirty years old and yet it holds up as a modern flick. I look at anything from the nineties I’ve recently viewed and they all feel very nineties. In the last week, I watched American Beauty and Eyes Wide Shut- both from 1999. They, in their own way, feel unmistakably nineties. I can’t fully explain it, but you know what I mean. Might be the blue nights or the screen-play dialogue- or directors that got Tarantinoed and those who didn’t. I don’t know entirely what it is, but Seven could pass as new thirty years later.
While I had been told there was some kind of twist, Spacey as the photographer and then as John Doe was an early read for me. I’m a massive Spacey fan (separate the art from artist if you feel off-put by my opinion) and I’ve seen most of his films plus the entirety of House of Cards. Both Seven and Usual Suspects were figured out in a matter of moments due to my heavy consumption of Spacey media. What was supposed to be a misleading and unpredictable adventure, Usual Suspects was quickly fleshed out in the literal first two minutes because of his shoulders and neck length. I spotted his limp as a fake Spacey limp and voila, the next two hours I waited to be right. And I was. Same went for Seven in his brief exposure in the stairwell, though as it turns out the reveal of Spacey as the killer wasn’t the pinnacle of the movie- the final sequence was.
I found it to be an almost perfect film, but the ending was muddied for me because of inconsistencies or improbable logic. Set the scene, they were mic’d up. One way mic from them to the chopper. A parcel delivery driver arrives. Somerset abandons Mills in the marsh fields to shoo off the driver. Two to three hundred yards up the road, the parcel delivery driver gives Somerset THE BOX. Somerset tells the chopper it’s a box, then opens said box. We don’t see it, but it’s Mills’s wife’s head, most certainly. Somerset walks back to Mills and John Doe. From the angle and distance, it was highly improbable that Mills could have seen that there was a box at all- and even if he could, Somerset’s reaction was so subtle- borderline understated- that the importance of said box might not have been understood. Instead of the natural human reaction of asking what the whole thing was about, Mills (Brad Pitt) jumps into a series of cascading poorly delivered questions; What’s in the box? What’s in the bo-ox? Wha-at’s in the box? No, hey, what was that all about, what was that he gave you? What was it? A box? What was in it? Just: wHaTs in tHE bOx?
His delivery in that scene, mixed with the logical improbability of him being informed- on any account, audible or visible- took me out of the moment for what has been regarded as a notoriously emotional and intense scene. I do not deny that it was a good scene- and everything before and after was great- but that one little slip of logic and over acting really tanked the feeling for me.
In a sense, this noir thriller had a literary type of ending, with no real tie-ups and no big reveal nor a large standoff. We ended with an intelligent and thought provoking conversation about the sinners all around us. The ambiguity of the box and the unpredictable-predictable nature of the last killing were top notch. Of course he would become Wrath, but we all rooted for the other thing, right? The ending where he doesn’t act and instead thinks about it- thinks about how his wife was murdered and she was pregnant and the killer is right in front of him and the- yeah, even if he thinks about it, an unloaded clip is the answer. Sin or not. If every moment from that December onwards wasn’t worth not dying for, this certainly was. Thank you David Fincher. Anyone who puts Gwyneth’s head in a box is alright with me.
-Chase
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