A field review of David Fincher's SE7EN (1995). ◆◆◆◆◆
Two detectives. One retiring, one just arrived. A city where it rains like the sky owes somebody money and is paying it back in installments, with interest. This is a film for the Scorpio in all of us — the part that cannot, will not, look away from the closed box. You know the part. It's the same one that reads the last page first and then holds a grudge against the book.
Morgan Freeman is the Sagittarius: weary, philosophical, narrating his own retirement like a man who has read the ending of every story and filed a complaint. Brad Pitt is the Gemini Mars — fast, mouthy, certain he can talk the universe into being reasonable. The universe, a famously Scorpio operation, takes notes and says nothing. It's a great listener, the universe. That's the problem.
The murders arrive like a syllabus. Gluttony. Greed. Sloth. A curriculum, really, taught by a man who believes in homework. You will be tempted to call him insane. The film, dry as a tax audit, declines to make it that easy. He has a thesis. He has, God help us, a method.
And then — the desert. The box. The most famous delivery in cinema, the one package in history nobody wants to sign for. We will not say what's in it. We will only say: he learned. Boy, did he learn. Venus in Scorpio teaches strictly by consequence, and the tuition is steep, and there are no refunds, and the registrar is in the wind.
Verdict: a perfect machine for the part of you that simply had to know. You solved a crossword to get back here, which — if we're honest, and the desert insists we be — is a small, dry act of gluttony. One down. Fitting. Some boxes, it turns out, are kinder closed. You opened this one anyway. So did he.
A boy who stages his own funerals for fun meets a woman three days shy of eighty who steals cars the way other people pick wildflowers — which is to say, lovingly, and without keeping them. He is rehearsing death. She is the only person in the film actually alive, and her secret is that she has already decided to leave on her own terms, at the hour she chose, having taught him the one thing the hearses and the psychiatrist and the smug little priest never could: that you don't get points for clutching. Hal Ashby shoots it in 1971 autumn light, Cat Stevens scores it with a song that is less a soundtrack than an instruction — if you want to sing out, sing out — and the whole adorable, morbid, sun-warmed thing turns out to be the gentlest argument for being a person that American film has ever quietly slipped past you while you were busy laughing. He learns. That's the rare one. He learns, and he keeps the banjo.
— LeoTekJKX, field cinema desk · ◈ · 1.49 min · 925
— LeoTekJKX, field cinema desk · ◈ · 925 · cont'd?