Racial background vs. foreground: Seven Pounds

This weekend I saw the film Seven Pounds. It came out this past December starring Will Smith and with the same production company that produced Smith's Pursuit of Happyness.


And I was struck by the way that the film featured, in the background and the foreground, so many people of color.

[SPOILER ALERT: Although I will try NOT to give away too much of the film's plot/ending, there may be inadvertent spoilers that come up, so if you want to see the film without knowing any specific details, STOP READING NOW]

The star of the film, Smith, is African American. As is his past love interest (which we see in flashbacks). His current love interest in the film is played by Rosario Dawson (which means that her character can be interpreted as either Latino or mixed-race African American or just simply African American). Woody Harrelson (white American) plays the role of a blind man, Barry Pepper (white American) is Smith's best friend in the film--and his partner/wife is African American. And other characters whom Smith encounters in this film (which I should note here takes place in Los Angeles) include Spanish speaking/Latino (probably Chicano) characters, African Americans, and white Americans.

[Aside: Curiously enough, not a whole lot of Asians featured in this film--which always puzzles me, like in two other LA setting films, Hancock and Crash--this is a city chock full o'Asian Americans so how come they don't feature as prominently or when they do, they almost always appear as stock caricatures--and here I'm thinking of the Vietnmaese accented criminals who open Hancock and the Chinese immigrant couple (speaking Chinese and Chinese accented English) in Crash.]

In one scene in particular, Smith's character speaks in Spanish to a Latino woman, not because the woman can't speak English but seemingly to demonstrate that she can trust him -- that he quite literally speaks her language. And Smith, who it turns out speaks a smattering of Spanish, has a very good accent.

Unlike Crash, race, or perhaps its corollary, racism, isn't central to the film in the sense that this is a film ABOUT race. What I mean is, the characters don't talk about their racial identities. They don't talk about discrimination--and, in fact, quite pointedly I think, the one stark inter-racial couple, the white best friend of Smith's character and his black wife, are introduced to the audience while playing golf. I mean lets face it, if you were going to find a scene where you'd have a racial clash or comment, doing it on a golf course where you have an inter-racial black-white couple with a black man showing up in the middle of the fairway seems as good a place as any.

[Aside: I should also add that it struck me as odd--the golf scene. Not from a racial pov, but because when you play golf, you usually don't have random people in suits walking up to you on the fairway to have a conversation--and they were standing on the middle of the fairway, and I must admit that the golfer in me wondered what the other players were thinking about Pepper and Smith's character just chatting away on the course, and why the marshall didn't come out and tell them to keep play moving or ask Smith to leave, but then again there are A LOT of things about this film that causes you to pause and question the logic, which is another thing I suppose I should mention for anyone wanting to see it.]

One of the interesting things that I realized, as I saw these various characters unfold and get introduced and fleshed out through the course of the film is the use of race as a tonal element. Similar to Hancock, there are various characters of various races introduced. But what seems distinct from Hancock is the prominence of minor characters who are major to the film being people of color. In other words, the people of color in Seven Pounds are in some ways peripheral but also very important to the film to show that Smith's character lives in a world populated with people of different ethnic backgrounds who are part of his intimate inner circle as well as random strangers and acquaintances he encounters in his day to day life. Race, as a tonal element in this film, suggests what a mixed-race American looks like where people are just people and are defined by their function within the film (doctor, lawyer, best friend, golfer, aeronautic engineer, printer) but not by their racial or ethnic attributes/identity.

As I noted above, there are some logistical anomalies or problems at the heart of this film, so to speak. But it's also an incredibly philosophical film about the nature of life and death. And perhaps, given my recent melancholy mood, it was what I needed or wanted. The unexpectedly interesting introduction of so many different characters of color just living their lives in this film made it a bonus for me -- and made me realize that Hollywood really IS capable of doing this--of incorporating more characters of color in both the background and foreground--not to introduce the issue of race but to more accurately reflect the fact that for many of us, we live in mixed race worlds where people of different races just are.