It's been a few hours now, and I'm still not quite sure how I feel about Seven Pounds. I know that Will Smith acted, no, re-created himself, as something different from what we've seen. What follows are my ramblings on what I saw, and my inferences, hopefully without blowing wide open the surprises of the film... but those who haven't seen it yet, beware.

Smith as Ben serves up something different, because Ben is not a superhero, not a badass, not a valiant, single father. No, Ben is a man with a dark secret, more than one really, who is on a mission to find a "good" man or "good" woman to whom he can give a gift of his help. We know early on, maybe even from the first time we saw the previews, that Ben is a man with tragedy in his past, with guilt and shame in his heart, and a strong desire to make enough right happen to counterbalance the bad he's done.

And while I want to rail against the inability of humans to save themselves, and highlight the power of Jesus Christ to save us from our sins and death, Seven Pounds never pushes on me that Ben's actions provide him absolution or even the least amount of forgiveness. What he he finds, though, is redemption in the midst of his atypical love affair with Rosario Dawson's Emily, which provides him that moment of resurrection, whatever you will. But the sacrifice that he wills upon himself in that very moment of redemption is one that I find to be a "mixed bag."

Vanity Fair's reviewer said that the end would cause people of religious persuasions to question the movie, and I do. But like Million Dollar Baby or Pay It Forward, I find the elements to reveal a little bit about human nature. Ben looks for good in others to remind him of the good that he once saw in himself. Ben's sacrifice is an attempt to make the lives of seven others better, even as he turns into judge and jury in some cases. Ben wants to believe that there IS good in the world, even that we are created good, and I think he finds it.

Can I recommend this movie to you? I don't know. It's thought-provoking, soul-searching stuff that moves eerily along as if in a dream before ripping away your comfort and dragging you down to the bottom of an ice cold lake. It's one of the moments that I'll remember forever, like the climax of Mystic River, which is gripping storytelling but never an experience that I would subject myself to again. I KNEW what would happen even as the movie rolled, accelerating, toward its crashing hault, but I couldn't take my eyes off the screen.

Maybe Will Smith is just that good. Maybe you can't take your eyes off of him. Or maybe, the story evokes something greater: the desire to see someone do something so fundamentally mind-boggling, so completely outside of the box, for others, that we are inspired ourselves to be something better.

Maybe Ben is a hero after all.