Martin Brest’s Meet Joe Black asks a big question and then takes three hours to avoid answering it. The film runs 178 minutes. It is a romance, a fantasy and a drama, and it is based on the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday. Anthony Hopkins plays Bill Parrish, a media mogul days from his 65th birthday. Brad Pitt plays the stranger who arrives at his door. The stranger is Death.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Bill Parrish and the Voice at Dinner
The setup is the best thing in the movie. Bill hears a voice he tries to ignore. His chest aches. At dinner with his family, the voice calls him out of the room and asks the question that has been haunting him: “Am I going to die?” The answer is yes. Death has taken the body of a young man Susan met in a coffee shop, a man she never got the name of before he was struck by multiple cars.
Bill deduces who his guest is. Death offers a trade. Bill will serve as his guide on Earth, and Death will postpone taking him. Under pressure to explain the stranger, Bill names him Joe Black. That name, and that bargain, carry the first hour.
A Naive Guest and a Jealous Protege
Pitt’s Joe is a grown man seeing food and feeling for the first time. He is fascinated by emotion and by the small things everyone else takes for granted. Claire Forlani’s Susan, a resident in internal medicine, is intrigued by his naïveté. She is also in a relationship with Drew, her father’s protégé, and she is not deeply in love. Bill told her to wait for someone who would sweep her off her feet.
Then the film splits in two. One half is a love story between Susan and Joe. The other is a corporate thriller. Drew, jealous of the attraction between them, conspires to sell the company after Bill rejects a major merger. He uses Bill’s strange reliance on Joe to manipulate Quince, Allison’s husband, into pushing the board to vote Bill out as chairman and approve the merger.
| Thread | Who drives it | What it costs the film |
|---|---|---|
| Susan and Joe | Joe’s curiosity, Susan’s intrigue | The middle hour |
| The merger | Drew, Quince, the board | The last hour |
| Bill’s bargain | Bill and Death | The whole runtime |
The two threads never braid. They take turns.
What the Cast Carries
Hopkins is the reason to stay. Reviewers generally praised his performance, and the praise is earned. He plays a man who has built everything and is losing it on a schedule, and he does it without raising his voice. Forlani is warm and watchable. Marcia Gay Harden’s Allison, Jeffrey Tambor’s Quince and Jake Weber’s Drew are given little to do but move the plot.
Pitt has the harder job and the stranger one. He is playing a force of nature wearing a young man’s body, and the film asks him to be blank, then tender, then blank again. It works in scenes and stalls in others. The script, by Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, Kevin Wade and Bo Goldman, gives him wonder and almost no wit.
Here is the problem. A three-hour film about death learning to live should earn its length. This one does not. The pacing is slow, and the screenplay spends its best ideas early. Joe meets one of Susan’s terminally ill patients, a Jamaican woman who senses what he is. That scene is quiet, strange and better than anything around it. It lasts a few minutes.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| November 8, 1998 | Premieres as the closing-night film of the Tokyo International Film Festival |
| November 13, 1998 | Released in the United States by Universal Pictures |
The film grossed $142.9 million worldwide against a budget of $90 million. That is a hit, and it is worth saying plainly. The box office is not the argument. The argument is that a movie can be a hit and still be a slog.
Meet Joe Black wants to be about the bargain between a dying man and Death. It keeps cutting away to a boardroom. The tagline is “Sooner or later everyone does.” The film takes sooner and stretches it past the point of patience. Hopkins is worth the ticket. The other two hours are the toll.
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