How direction transcends the source material.

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2002)

This commentary contains spoilers.
Screenwriters often complain about the "A Film By ..." credit showcasing a film's director for having conceived every aspect of the story. If one takes a look at "Se7en" (particularly the DVD) one will see a flaw in this argument.
Reading the original source material -- the screenplay -- one sees yet another buddy-cop film. The two detectives naturally don't get along, and of course one's about to retire. The killer has a made-for-TV gimmick to his violent rampage (as Detective Mills himself says: "You're a movie of the week, a bleeping T-shirt . . . at best!"). The captain exists more or less to tell his detectives they're wasting their time and out of line (he does not, however, attempt to take their badges and guns). By the end, the two heroes are (in Somerset's words) "for the first time ever, in total agreement."
There's even a Stallone-style punchline in the original script, which has Somerset executing John Doe and announcing, "I'm retiring!"
Funny. When you watch "Se7en," you don't notice any of that. The cookie-cutter script is transcended by David Fincher, the film's director, and his cast and crew. One hesitates to say they "livened" up the film given its inherent murk, but without their contributions what would you have had? A knock-off of a dozen other cop movies.
You can still spot the flowchart in some of the dialogue (especially the first meeting of Somerset and Mills) and subplots (the absurd notion that Somerset might not take this case as he is about to retire). But the film never lets itself lurk in TV-grade banality. Often Fincher stages the actors in real time, letting them exist as humans (witness the scene where Mills moves into Somerset's office, or the tiny pause after the dinner at the Mills' before conversation resumes). The dirge-like music and grim crime scenes pulse with horror; afterward, the film pauses to let the two cops console each other as they sift through this violent mess. Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman bring opposite styles to their characters and breathe life into their moments, but in the end product there is mercifully no mention of their respective races, and only perfunctory mention of their age difference. They're two cops, working on a case.
In pacing and tone this film resembles an early 1970s cop drama like "Serpico," where the audience is not force-fed exposition or standard lines of dialogue. A lesser director and crew might have given us an episode of "Miami Vice," with a maniacal, screaming John Doe chewing up his scenes. It is therefore worth mentioning the great choice by Kevin Spacey to play John Doe as the opposite of the Dennis Hopper-type villain which was Xeroxed into many films of the 1990s. He is, as the movie says, "methodical, exacting, and worst of all, patient."
By examining the DVD one can find the early stages of a rote film (in the deleted scenes, original ending, and script). By watching the film itself one can see how masters of their craft can filter out the crap and deliver an end-product which doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator.