It was 1995 and halfway through two decades, one of time and one of cinema. The Silence of the Lambs appeared at the very start of the decade and scooped box office share, critical acclaim and five Oscars on its way home. This meant that the screens of the 1990s would be stuffed full of serial killer movies, petering out with the likes of The Cell in 2000. Because of the acute curve of the success, this sub-genre of crime procedural developed its checklist traits rapidly, taking pretty much everything from Silence and repeating it with different character names. Until this one.
That's not to say that Seven is cliche-free. The fatigued cop on his one last job and his clashes with a rookie as well as the higher ups are all standard fare. What's missing is the federal agency with its control and collected wisdom. The wizened Somerset is going off his knowledge of culture, history, literature and the infernal dark of human nature. When the FBI appears, it's clandestine and dodgy. There is a clear sense that Somerset and his volatile new partner are adrift in the circles of an urban hell, alone against a malevolence that moves through the constant rain like a a shadow.
The lack of FBI order is important. With it, the more conventional serial killer flick was able to provide a base. This meant that audiences were welcome to thrill to the murders and cruelty against the objects of their disdain, barracking for the killer until the Feds crash in at the end and everybody rallied around them as though they had been all along. The serial killer movie was mainstream cinema as sleazy and misanthropic as it could be without an X rating. Each new entry offered a genius psychopath whose kill scenes quickly grew into impossible architectural wonders with ever more disturbing machinery and motive. Seven includes some elaborate setups but they tend to be more practical and, very importantly, nixes the notion of the comfortably insane killer.
John Doe is extreme in his obsessive M.O. His meticulously homecrafted notebooks are intentionally kept without date and shelved randomly. The removal of his fingerprints with razorblades is ugly but comprehensible. His clues are as clear as they are taunting. The neon cross over his bedhead in his apartment is, I still think, overdone, but it does illustrate his strangely static idea of religion. That he is an intensely angry citizen keeps him a lot scarier than the wildly unhinged monsters of the sub-genre. The big bust in does not catch him and almost feels like a comment on the fad with its anticlimactic payoff. John Doe turns himself in; this movie has more on its mind than popular catharsis.
Fincher's unnamed American city is drenched with rain. Its shadows are deep and filled with darker detail. All surfaces look grimy and worn, even in the police station. Mills and his wife live in a flat that needs a lot of work and shakes as subway trains pass by. The sex club that becomes a crime scene feels like a near extension to the life in the streets and offices of even the cleaner parts of town. As he did again in Fight Club, Fincher imbues the demeanour and voices of his characters with a kind of palpable fatigue. Everyone is cranky and sleep deprived but, as the sex club manager says when asked if he likes what he does: "No, but that's life, isn't it?"
This city could be anywhere and almost at any time. When John Doe delivers his monologue on the idea that his victims were innocent, he could be writing an epistle. Seven's effort into examining the town as a living organism as a terminal patient had not appeared before in this run of movies that increasingly reduced themselves to good genius against bad genius with action endings. When John Doe proposes his deal and the rain stops the scene switches from the unbreathable claustrophobia of the alleys and dives to the bare desert stage under the high tension wires of the climax and there, in the bareness of the featureless earth the final two moments of destruction are revealed. Hamfisted symbolism? Sure, but what a relief from the last minute battering ram of an FBI raid. John Doe's scheme was not suicidal even though it meant he'd be dead at its conclusion, it was the preaching that Somerset identified at the start: his envy was killed by Mills's wrath. No serial killer movie had ended like that. Even at cost of his own life, the bad guy won, no switching back to the law team for the audience.
The casting for this one was also illustrative. Morgan Freeman was well into a decades long career and had starred memorably in the recent Shawshank Redemption. After this he was awarded gravitas rights to any lead role that could accommodate him (including God). His turn as the world weary Somerset is a primer in how to freshen a cliched character. At times his performance is documentary perfect. There is a look he gives Mills early on. We only see it from behind but we imagine it effortlessly. His three stage laugh at the shaking flat feels natural. The double take at the whole bottle glass of wine that Mills has handed him is laugh out loud funny. And through most of the running time he is shouldering the darkness of the life around him, knowing that it's just only ever degrees of that for all of life.
Brad Pitt had an interesting 1995. His brief career had included noticeable turns in Thelma and Louise, Johnny Suede and the hilarious stoner in True Romance but the most he'd done prior to Seven was the vacant Louis in Interview With the Vampire. Seven and Twelve Monkeys turned him into an explosion of notice and guaranteed stardom. Is his performance in Seven overbaked with its James Dean mumbles and De Niro lash-outs? Maybe, but there's a mass of tiny nuances in there, as well. They can be as subtle as the industrial soundscape sizzling under the dialogue almost constantly. It's not just the operatic blast of the finale.
Gwyneth Paltrow also shows range and skill as Mills's wife, stepping back into a kind of midwest everywoman with a plain show. It's when she talks in private about her pregnancy to Somerset that she shows what she can do. She listens to Somerset's personal story with natural attention until he throws it back to her and she barely controls a break into tears.
The surprise for me was Kevin Spacey. I'd never heard of him when I saw this at the cinema, taking up half a row with the usual gang o' friends. His dramatic entrance as John Doe at the police station, murmuring and then screaming and then falling back into his studied calm recharged a movie that wasn't wanting more energy. The dialogue in the car which he dominates is constantly chilling, especially in moments where his demeanour breaks and his face suggest the expression he would wear as his victims breathed their last. After seeing this, I got a backlog of his prior movies and went through them. While he betrayed a number of traits common to all amounting to a smarmy urbanity, he brought a managed rage to John Doe we wouldn't see again until House of Cards. John Doe's control and its breaks are extraordinary.
But Seven is more than performance and plot. Fincher's oppressive city sounds like a construction site. Howard Shore's low brass bam bam bam chords are flown in from his work on Silence of the Lambs (not really, but almost). It might seem trivial to mention the typography of the credits and titles throughout the film, announcing the day of the week but they became the way dark crime cinema and television was expressed with their juddering handwritten look as through the names and roles were thought up by an enraged brain. The title sequence supports this with its montage of what we'll come to know as John Doe making his notebooks, shaving his fingerprints and messes of crime scene photography. This felt like a galaxy away from the slick perfection of the Silence of the Lambs credits and titling and, once crossed, it was a line that took years to cross back.
Seven was numbing at the cinema. I recall my small gang zombie shuffling out of the cinema at a week night screening without our usual wordy yapping. When I was asked my opinion out on the footpath, walking to my tramstop the best I could muster was: "Better than Silence of the Lambs". Still, I retain that opinion. A friend of mine at a catch up drink talked about it and derided its persistent ugliness. I reminded her that it was about the ugliness of human behaviour but she wasn't convinced. A future girlfriend told me that she'd got out of a screening in the city and walked for almost an hour to her flat and only when she opened the door had a sudden panic at leaving herself so vulnerable.
I kept going to serial killer movies, watching them grow increasingly feeble and try hard. I'll note the exception of Simon Reynolds' wonderful The Ugly but even the visual splendour of Tarsem Singh's The Cell felt like window dressing on the Titanic. The sub-genre had printed through by the early 2000s and would soon be replaced by torture porn which had even fewer scruples about exploiting the worst in its audiences. That, too, is a epochal memory. I got into the phenomenon of the serial killer for a few months, buying every book I could find on real cases and dredging an internet only too eager to share such genuine horror until I exhausted my capacity for it and couldn't bear the thought of it. Seven, with its break with a sleazy convention, its shift of the depiction of murder from act to aftermath, and concentration on morality, remains one of the best illustrations that the peaks of genre are non conformist. Along with The Ugly and Henry, it is the only one of its kind that I'll revisit. Gotta count for something.
Viewing notes: for this review, I watched the recently released 4K remaster that is still available in a swanky steelbook at time of writing. Seven has always looked good on home video and now it actively stuns. Fincher has added a few things via AI and CGI but they are not instrusive. The grain was always very fine with this one and needs a little squinting to see but is still there. Seven is available on all digital disc formats and via streaming on Stan and Prime by subscription and rental through the usual outlets.
No comments:
Post a Comment