David Fincher's SE7EN at 30

SE7EN DEADLY SPOILERS AHEAD 

(This is not a proper review so much as me just sort of rambling a what if scenario about the ending, the friend I conversed with was cinematographer/videographer Mattie Rosen by the way look them up they're great).

I mean, this is and will probably always be as taut and skillful and brilliantly (or the word I need is rightly) shot and cut and acted by everyone here, from Freeman to (albeit a slightly twitchy) Pitt to Paltrow (really she is underrated in it to the Nth degree, especially that crucial diner scene with Somserset) and on down the wonderful lot of character actors who get to range from down to earth to everything Leland Orser is doing (and it is rather strange to see Schiff without a goatee and speaking political platitudes in something from the 1990s but I digress), and I'd even go as far as to say it's a great Pot-Boiler in the absolute clinical sense of that term. If you show this to most people, primarily when they are like 14 or 15 and don't know or realize how dark the world can get, it'll fuck with them well and good....

But there's something that stuck with me for several months now since I had a relatively brief and substantive conversation with a close movie-buddy (or it was years, time has lost meaning after all) about the film and primarily the loss of "shock" over the ending. Or I shouldn't say loss as that's not the word, but my friend feeling over the immense nihilistic upper cut that it's meant to bring to us (Envy and Wrath in one sickening moment, and of course we don't even see what's in the box). Anyway, they had other issues with the Grim-dark tone of the film that I don't, but a point they made stuck which was simply this: if *Somerset* pulls the trigger instead of Mills, then it's suddenly a vastly more complex ending.

I still don't know about complex, but it does strike me now seeing the film again that it would be much more of a *satisfying* sort of ending, and less expected, while still trying in to that talk Tracy and Somerset have where she tells him about her pregnancy and not telling Mills (my one note that AK Walker would have probably thrown in the trash and maybe rightly so is that Mills did know, like she tells him in bed or something I dunno, so you don't have that whole "Oh... he doesn't know" line, womp womp).  Suddenly, Somserset sees that head and *he* has the explosive anger instead of Mills, who we've seen get to this point several times already, and it forces him as well as us to confront the fact that he won't stick to the same sort of "by the book" code he's stuck to when push comes to (ahem) Boxing Day.

(exception being the info on the library and FBI hey hey doesn't know about that hush hush)

Point being, I wasn't thinking about this constantly since my talk with my buddy, but it came back with a force as I question Spacey - in a tone of voice that interestingly he doesn't change all that much for Lester Burnham for much of American Beauty lol - monologuing in the back of that car and getting his willing prey right to their target destination.  It, and the film and how it uses all of the great tools of genre cinema to its utmost potential, also got me thinking about Nihilism, the thought that could be just darkness in the world and that it may still be worth fighting for even if therr is no good in it (or on the edge of town as the song goes), and how there's another film I viewed recently that hit much points with always a more powerful rigor: No Country for Old Men.

In that film, which is for sure not quite the same as this as it focuses on the old Cat and Mouse chase but just the same has a walking psychotic force that leads a police force to dead ends (and here there is no point left behind by Chigurh as a "message"), we see this being interact with those in the world and you can't get Anton Chigurh out of your head.  In particular, with every rewatch I have of that film as I get older I never cease to be haunted by Carla Jean and Chigurh; why he's there, his twisted pretzel logic that makes so much sense to him just as much why he has to be there for his own code (John Doe has a "code" too... from ::points up mutely:: up there somewhere), and why is he leaving things the way he does. 

I'm not sure I've been haunted the same way by John Doe, and I've seen Se7en a good six or seven times over the years because there actually isn't as much enigma or weirdness to John Doe. Much as he wants to hype himself up as doing the BIG THING that everyone will remember him for, and maybe he had more of a point in a killer obsessed 1995, he is still what Mills calls him: a Movie of the Week/T-shirt, though with an extensive collection of items out from the library.  I don't mean to get on some negative high horse since he is still a memorable Movie Character and Spacey brings it.  But I also don't sit up in terror over his kind of senselessness in the world, especially since... he makes too much sense LOL. 

At any rate, my giant question mark and potential re-writing of the end of Se7en besides, Fincher and Walker and company do do an excellent submersion - and a sub-genre trend setter (for better and worse) - that at the core makes the same philosophical argument/plea as Patton Oswalt paraphrased his late wife Michelle McNamara as stating as... CHAOS - or - BE KIND.  And if Se7en teaches us anything, it's that moral grandstanding and chaos and murder is no way to... get ahead in life.

I'll see myself out now under the Pride category....