Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 23, 1995 TAG: 9509260106
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Seven" is dark, dark, dark. There is so little light in some scenes, you want to reach out and turn on a lamp - or get the hell out of the room.
And the killer is as shrewd as he is evil.
But "Seven" is better. It's leaner, more realistic - relentlessly realistic - and leaves you with more than that typical post-thriller feeling of having just gotten off a roller coaster.
It wiggles into the psyche - through the competing belief systems of its three central characters - and lingers.
The story isn't entirely new: Freeman is a veteran homicide detective named William Somerset who's literally counting the days to retirement, less than a week away. He is called to the scene of what appears to be a death of natural causes, along with David Mills (Pitt), who has just been reassigned to the New York City Police 14th Precinct at his request.
But the victim - an obese man - was apparently forced to eat until he died. He is bound at the ankles and wrists, and his face is submerged in a bowl of food.
His sin: gluttony.
Somerset sees what's coming and wants out before the case can suck him in. Mills is cocky, not bright enough to get the picture (yet), and he doesn't much like Somerset, so he would gladly take the case himself.
But he has so much to learn. Even his wife, Tracy, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, knows David needs the older detective, so she intervenes - inviting Somerset over to dinner to get the two talking to each other.
And it's a good thing, because this killer with a penchant for Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas is just getting warmed up.
If just about anybody else but Morgan Freeman had been cast as William Somerset, "Seven" would be an unusually scary cop buddy flick. But as Somerset, Freeman is as quiet and exact as the metronome that puts him to sleep each night.
And Pitt is perfectly cast as the still idealistic young detective, whose successes have gone to his head a little. When Somerset tells him to get up to speed on Chaucer, Aquinas and Dante, he gets the Cliff's Notes. Yup.
That's where good writing helps. This is a thriller, of course, so there's a terrific, heart-pounding chase scene, some very scary murder scenes (graphically violent is perhaps an understatement) and lots of that creepy, beautiful lighting. What makes it special is that when these two cops are chilling out after the chase, they talk about the world, what assumptions they're operating by.
And when we meet the killer, the amazing Kevin Spacey (see ``Glengarry, Glen Ross") well, you almost wish they'd clamp one of those Hannibal Lechter "shutuppa-you-face" masks on him. Because what HE has to say is pretty disturbing.
The writer is Andrew Kevin Walker. The director is a music video-commercial veteran named David Fincher. The cinematographer is Darius Khondji, who shot the beautiful "Before The Rain."
And anytime these guys want to get together again and make a movie, I'll fork over my $5.50 to see what they've done. With my fingers laced over my eyes.
by CNB