I'm still fuming over Seven Pounds, even after the movie has come and gone, long enough for it to matter again, now that the movie has landed on DVD. I'm fuming because it sickens me that people think that it's somehow nice or sweet or kind or generous or benevolent or wise or anything good at all that Will Smith should be able to decide who lives and who dies.

SPOILERS GALORE!

Yup, that's the premise of the flick. Smith is feeling so super guilty after causing a car accident that killed seven people -- including his wife -- that he has decided he shall off himself in grand martyr fashion: He's gonna help seven still-alive people in the process, by donating his organs to them after he's dead.

If you see the problem with that, good for you: You're seeing through the moral battlefield that is this movie. In most cases, donors do not get to decide who should receive their organs -- in most cases, it wouldn't work anyway, because most donated organs are vital, requiring that the donor be dead, and no one knows when they're going to die. But imagine if we could predict such things on a regular basis. Imagine how a poor, desperate father might be persuaded to commit suicide because some rich bastard who's not afraid to play hardball promises to pay the poor man's family $50,000 in exchange for the father's heart. It's to head off potentialities like this that we have the medical-ethic sitch we have today, with organ registries that log the neediest cases on a purely medical basis.

You cannot walk into a hospital and say, "Hey, look, I've got a good heart in this chest here, and I want you to give it to that particular dying person, and that one alone."

Unless you are Will Smith, the noble Everyman of 2000's Hollywood, the veritable Jimmy Stewart of the Great Depression II. Will's gonna vet the good and the kind -- and weed out the mean and the petty and the bastardy -- and determine who shall benefit from his godlike largesse. So pretty but sickly Rosario Dawson will earn his heart (and I hate that that's kind of a pun, because he falls in love with her before he dies). Noble Job-like blind man Woody Harrelson will earn his eyes. Et cetera.

Ugh. Look, I like Will Smith, but ugh. Who is he to judge who is worthy of life, and who isn't? It might be nice if he got a smackdown in the end, something that quashed all his well-laid plans, but the movie lets him get away with it.

It wouldn't have taken much to fix Seven Pounds. Maybe Will wakes up on in a goo bath on an alien spaceship, and it turns out that the inhabitants of planet Jncxxawq think human organs are an especial delicacy, and so they clone us terran primates for our meat. See, Will's just been dreaming all along in the goo bath about being what he figured was a nice guy, but the joke's on him! He's dinner ... and maybe cold leftovers for breakfast the next morning. His organs ain't goin' nowhere except into the frying pan, or maybe into some canapeés.

Or maybe Will is Hannibal Lecter's latest victim, and he's fantasizing about some good coming out of the cannibalization of his own body. Or maybe he's stuck in the middle of the latest Saw game and hallucinating to protect his sanity.

But best of all would have been this: Seven Pounds is exactly the same as it is, except, in the final scene, a hoard of angry transplant surgeons inform Will's lawyer decide that, despite Will's will and his well-laid plans, pretty and sickly Rosario Dawson ain't gettin' his heart, because there's a 12-year-old in Spokane who needs it more. And noble Job-like Woody Harrelson ain't gettin' his eyes, because there's a lifer convict in a prison in Texas who lost his eyes to an acid attack in the clink's auto shop, and he's the one who's gonna see again.

Maybe it wouldn't have rendered Smith's "sacrifice" for naught, but at least it would have said that those who try to play god play a dangerous game.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson, keep calm and carry on (email me)

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