Unlikely pursuit
‘Seven Pounds’ puts Will Smith’s box-office appeal to the test
Will Smith takes long strides across a room. His smile is wide. His laugh is booming.
He shakes my hand like he’s a corporate CEO and we’ve just closed on a million-dollar deal.
He was here just two years ago, promoting his Oscar-nominated “The Pursuit of Happyness,” and little seems to have changed: This is a guy very conscious of his power to instantly win over whoever is in his midst.
Except once the interview begins, a different side of Smith is revealed. For the first time in recent memory, the world’s biggest movie star – a man whose least commercially successfully effort of the past six years, “Bad Boys II,” managed to gross $273 million worldwide – seems to be a little worried about his latest project.
“It’s definitely patience-trying,” Smith acknowledges of “Seven Pounds,” an unexpectedly somber drama that opens nationwide today.
“This is a movie that totally banks on the fact that you trust the filmmakers. It tries my patience … but I would say that I was fairly certain that people will be able to get through (it).”
Directed by Gabriele Muccino, with whom Smith also made “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Seven Pounds” unfolds in extremely (some might say maddeningly) elliptical fashion; it takes more than an hour before we have even the vaguest inkling of what is actually happening.
Smith plays Ben Thomas, an IRS agent – or at least that’s what he appears to do for a living – who takes a special interest in the cases of a seemingly unrelated group of people, including Rosario Dawson as a woman with a deadly heart condition and Woody Harrelson as a blind telemarketer.
Clearly Ben is harboring some sort of secret. Whether audiences will still be paying attention by the time the grand revelation takes place, however, remains open to debate.
It’s a very strange choice for an actor who talks often about “studying patterns” and who says that he’s forever looking “for the No. 1 answer” – those rare commercial projects that bridge race, gender and nationality in their appeal.
“There’s a picture in my mind of who I want to be,” Smith says, “and ‘Seven Pounds’ – no matter how difficult it is to sell – is in line with the aggressive left turn that I feel like I need to make artistically.”
A guy whose last films, “Hancock” and “I Am Legend,” had a combined worldwide gross of $1 billion feels the need to make an aggressive left turn?
“I just turned 40,” Smith explains. “I don’t want people to feel like they know what I’m going to do. That’s not fun; that’s not exciting. If you know what something is, there’s no reason to look (at it).
“What we were trying to do with ‘I Am Legend’ – and I think we did a very good job with it – was to do both things. There are ideas and concepts, and there’s a real performance at the center of it. But you also have the bells and whistles of the blockbuster film.”
The chances that “Seven Pounds” will emerge as a blockbuster are looking slim.
The studio has labored hard to keep the central premise of the film under wraps. (In the 24 hours preceding my interview with Smith, I received calls from three publicists, insisting that I didn’t ask a certain question that might result in the secret being ruined.)
But the Internet has been rife with spoiler-ridden blog posts that have relentlessly mocked the film.
A reviewer for the New York Post wrote that it “should be more accurately titled ‘Seven Hundred Pounds of Schmaltz.’ ”
The film has not been mentioned in any of the year-end critics’ awards selections, and last week it failed to secure any Golden Globe nominations.
Smith is comfortable with the potentially negative responses, and in fact thinks they’re essential for keeping his career in high gear.
“If everybody loves it, you’re not in the right spot, but if everybody hates it, you’re not in the right spot,” he says.
Whether this could prove to be his worst career move since “The Legend of Bagger Vance” in 2000:
“Talk to me in three months,” Smith says, laughing.