Seven Remains Morgan Freeman’s Best Performance

Morgan Freeman is an icon. His voice is instantly recognizable. He has a screen persona that brings immediate gravitas to everything from superhero movies like Batman Begins to Oscar players such as Invictus. Freeman even maintains dignity while pitching credit cards and playing a goofy wizard in The Lego Movie. Yet as universally beloved as Freeman is, his best bit of acting gets overlooked. At this point, 30 years after its release, the twist ending of Seven is well known, as is the way Freeman’s co-star Brad Pitt plays the horrid reveal. How Pitt conveys the horror of a young hotshot detective realizing that his wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) was beheaded by a serial killer is endlessly quoted. And for good reason.

But Pitt’s despairing breakdown distracts from the way Freeman approaches the same scene as veteran detective William Somerset. Freeman keeps the terror internalized, which not only grounds his character but also makes the fundamental horror of Seven all the more upsetting.

A Dark City in a Dark Movie

Even all these decades later, discussion of Seven seems to revolve around the ghastly set pieces cooked up by director David Fincher and screenwriter Kevin Andrew Walker. To be sure, the grotesque ways in which mysterious killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) kills his victims, all via elaborate tableaus inspired by the Catholic Seven Deadly Sins, stick in the memory. But there’s a clear difference between Seven‘s rich morality and pulpy (but often fun!) films like Saw. Seven might have inspired the torture porn wave of the following decade, but it isn’t of that exploitative subgenre.

Fundamentally Seven is a film noir; a throwback to that collection of crime films inspired by hard-boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Most of Seven‘s action follows its lead gumshoes as they traverse across an unnamed, perpetually rainy city, unraveling the clues behind what seem to be, at first, just disconnected murders.

As demonstrated by the term film noir (“black film” or “dark film”), the genre features cynical worldviews in which the downtrodden Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe uncovers all manner of corruption at the top of society, even as they fail to stop it. Seven might not distill that worldview in a single line, like fellow latter day noir Chinatown, but it does drive Freeman’s character, Somerset. The up-and-coming Mills and Pitt’s showy performance suggests a young person still full of hope. But in Freeman’s quiet, resigned performance, we see a person who knows just how bad the world can be.

Effective as it is, such subtle acting can be easily overlooked, especially in Freeman’s finest moment, a scene for which Pitt gets most of the attention.

Quiet Terror

The final act of Seven begins with Doe arriving at the police station to turn himself in, and to strike a dreadful bargain with Somerset and Mills. He’ll tell them where to find the victims of the last two sins, envy and wrath, if they drive him to a distant location that only he knows. The detectives agree to drive Doe out into a desert, populated only by power lines, scattered junk, and a busted trailer.

At a time appointed by Doe, a delivery van drives toward the trio. Somerset leaves Doe with Mills to intercept the driver, and he keeps his partner at a distance when he learns that the delivery is for Pitt’s David Mills. What follows is stuff of cinematic legend. Somerset opens the box and recoils—and then immediately starts telling Mills to put down his gun. As Mills tries to make sense of his partner’s shouting, Doe begins monologuing, slowly revealing that he has assaulted and killed Paltrow’s pregnant Tracy, and placed her head in the box.

Certainly Freeman allows Somerset some burst of emotion in this sequence. There’s the shutter that runs through his body when he peers into the box, the backhand he delivers to Doe to stop the killer from talking. However, Freeman never goes as big as his screen partners, not Spacey savoring every malevolent description that Doe offers, nor Pitt’s wild gesticulating and moaning. Still, Freeman imbues each of his lines with emotion, emotion that’s all the more powerful for how hard Somerset tries to regain control of the spiraling situation. Freeman allows a waver in his voice as Somerset reminds Mills that Doe wants him to become biblical wrath and seek vengeance. He lets his hand jitter, his voice shake.

Through these slight movements, we see the actual stakes of Doe’s crimes. Throughout the film, Somerset has been the guy who has seen it all, a man who knows exactly how evil the world can be. As he faces retirement, he sees himself not as a guy who fought the good fight and even scored a few victories, but as someone who has done all he humanly could do, and it made no difference. Somerset sees immediately that the brash Mills has too much hope in humanity and faith in the law to survive in the city, but he’s willing to let the newcomer figure that out himself. That is until he meets Tracy and sees a glimmer of goodness in the world. And, despite himself, he begins to care again.

So while the revelation of Tracy’s death may not be as personally cutting as it is for Mills, Somerset loses something deeper and grander: the one sliver of meaning in the world. It’s the fact that Somerset has already lost all hope, including the hope he thought he may have regained, that informs Freeman’s subdued performance. When Somerset looks up at Mills right before the gun goes off, we see neither anger nor even sadness in Freeman’s eyes. He shows none because Somerset has none. Freeman hardly reacts when Mills fires his gun to kill Doe. Somerset does not react because there is no surprise.

Even the final bit of voiceover finds Freeman not doing the calm reassurance that has become his signature. “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,'” Freeman declares, with a sting of cynicism in a voice where once there was warmth. “I agree with the second part.” That’s not a promise to keep doing good work. That’s a recognition that there’s nothing else a good person can do in an awful world.

Unspeakable Dread

It’s easy to see why Freeman is the most overlooked part of Seven‘s climax, if not the entire film. By that point, he had already settled into elder statesman while Pitt was still new to high-profile serious work, and Spacey was an up-and-comer in Hollywood. Furthermore, the two get to do big emotions and big philosophies, all of which matches the intensity of movie’s murder scenes.

Yet it’s Freeman that keeps the film human. And as an actual human being living in a joyless world in which young husbands get their wives’ severed heads delivered to them, he prevents Seven from becoming a torture porn spectacle. He makes it into truly sublime horror.