Seven Pounds

I wrote this review a couple of years ago, but it's a movie that still has quite the impact...

I was initially intrigued by the movie “Seven Pounds” when a friend of mine recommended it to me. I asked her what the movie was about, and she said, “I can’t tell you—you just have to see it.”

Fast forward to an email I received from the American Mental Health Counselors Association which stated the organization had been approached to make a statement about the movie, because critics suggested it glorified suicide. Naturally, as a grief counselor, this piqued my interest even more and so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

Seven Pounds opens with Tim Thomas (portrayed by Will Smith) calling 911 to report a suicide—his own. The rest of the movie takes you through the past several years, and an interesting chain of events, which brought him to this point. Two years ago, Tim was a successful engineer and happily in love. Then one fatal mistake cost him everything; he was at fault in a fatal car accident which killed his fiancée and six others. Tim decides to dedicate the rest of his life to improving the lives of seven people to make up for the seven lives he took. He enlists the help of his best friend, an attorney, and his brother, an FBI agent, to find seven people worthy of receiving life-altering gifts. We follow him on his journey, changing the lives of good people. We also follow him on his own grief journey as he experiences a variety of emotions associated with all he has lost, and what he may lose in the future.

In the movie, I discovered that Tim completes William Worden’s four tasks of mourning: accepting the reality of his loss, experiencing the pain of his loss, adjusting to his new environment and finding a way to memorialize his fiancée and the others who died in the crash.

Has this piqued your interest? Do you want to know how Tim helps others, how he finds peace, how this movie ends? Well, I can’t tell you—you just have to see it.