For me, there is no such thing as movies I want to like. I either do, or I don't.
I guess I'm trying to hit on the conceptual aspect [...] I hear about a plot involving a serial killer ritually murdering people based on the seven deadly sins, that's a wickedly cool premise that I hope gets an execution that does it justice. But watching
Se7en, I want to like it so much because there's so much great material there and it's so frustrating watching it all slip away.
can you elaborate on this more?
The script sets up Freeman as the super rational/intellectual detective and Pitt as the emotional hothead. They butt heads, but this seems contrived. The film scholar Kristin Thompson has four categories of motivation for the existence in films of narrative events: (1) Compositional Motivation, (2) Realistic Motivation (3) Transtextual Motivation, and (4) Artistic Motivation. Compositional Motivation is sort of a fancy scholarly way of saying something is in the movie because it has to be so the plot moves along. It's not necessary in itself, but based on the way the movie is set-up, it needs to be there since there's only a point B in relation to a point A.
I get that they butt heads, but there seems to be no reason for the antagonism outside of setting up the "fun" dinner scene where everybody finally gets along and has fun and Freeman and Pitt commit to tracking down the killer. Why did I need to go through the half-hearted "conflict" before getting them teaming up? The answer via Compositional Motivation: Because there needed to be a conflict followed by a payoff. I
felt the screenwriting too much, it was too transparent and carried off very poorly.
Added to which---and this is the most egregious part of my complaint---the antagonism itself, despite being compositionally motivated, contradicts the characterization of Freeman's character. When they show up to one of the murder scenes and Pitt is getting into it with one of the cops at the scene, Freeman chides him for being so emotional and irrational, asking him what the point would've been about the confrontation he was about to have. This is fine as it is, this could serve as a totally organic sequence fleshing out the way these two operate, but then how do you reconcile the emotional and irrational antagonism of Freeman towards Pitt, where the roles are reversed with Freeman refusing to let it go and avoid confrontation until Pitt has to ask if they can stop kicking each other in the balls?
Of course, this could be countered by saying, in real life (in other words, in terms of the Realistic Motivation) not everyone is completely consistent with their personality and real people are hypocrites sometimes so why shouldn't this character be one? But my answer to that would be because that's not how he was being written before nor is Freeman's inexplicable hypocrisy complicated later, for he again chides Spacey near the end for being hypocritical but there's never any examination of Freeman himself, nothing is even implicit, because it's beyond the capabilities of the filmmakers. This, to me, is symptomatic of what I was saying about the film having pretensions to intelligence it simply did not possess. Stuff seems to be trying to poke through the surface, stuff that could've made for really rich and complex characterizations like something out of a Michael Mann film, but the chops necessary for such complexity and depth were beyond the capabilities of the brain trust on
Se7en, IMO.
I also thought Pitt's and Paltrow's relationship was so perfunctory and, again, just lazy Compositional Motivation. They were just there, and sometimes they seemed like the perfect golden couple, pretty young blonde high school sweethearts as American as apple pie, then sometimes they're fighting and having problems, but what the fuck was the point of any of it? There certainly wasn't any consistency, nor did anything amount to shit outside of the fact that the film needed to prop itself up on the idea of the happy couple to be able to have the ending be as shocking as it was supposed to be, but since they failed from so many different angles leading up to that ending, it couldn't have possibly been what it was supposed to be.
And, is there anything you liked at all about it?
I liked the moments where Freeman was being the detached, super logical detective. That seemed to be merely Transtextual Motivation, character decoration because the figure of the rational detective has currency in detective fiction with no organic mooring in the screenplay itself, but at least it was there. I wish that would've been developed and kept consistent, I wish something compelling would've been done with that. On the other hand, there was potential in his hypocrisy, but that potential was only made visible due to the shortcomings of the script, and as such, it sure as shit wasn't capitalized on as it wasn't even intentional!
And just a side note: Do they ever make clear why the picture of the lawyer's wife/girlfriend/mistress/whoever she was had bloody circles on her eyes? I always miss that and then, when I'm thinking back over the film, I remember it because it's such a striking image but can never recall how it's connected to anything.
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