Review: Meet Joe Black
When death comes knocking on your door in the form of Brad Pitt, there really isn't any reason to go on living. In Meet Joe Black, Pitt does indeed portray death and, no, the casting is not a punchline.
On the advent of his 65th birthday, media tycoon Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) begins hearing voices. Actually, it's one single voice. "Yes," it says. "Yes." But what is the question? In the throes of a later heart attack, the unspoken question is revealed. Has my time to die come? Parrish wonders. "Yes." But when death does arrive at his door, it comes with a proposal: death wants to take a look around before he takes Bill. In exchange for being death's guide, Bill will be granted more time. Assuming the guise of Joe Black (Pitt), death invites himself to dinner where he meets Bill's family: eldest daughter Allison (Marcia Gay Harden) and her husband Quince (Jeffrey Tambor), and Bill's favorite daughter Susan (Claire Forlani). Susan, confused by Joe's aloofness, remarks, "It's a shame that whoever you were this morning couldn't be here tonight."
Earlier that morning, Joe Black was a young man in a coffee shop that Susan found herself charmed by. Pitt has oft been monikered the modern-day Robert Redford; his introduction in the coffee shop brought to mind the image of Redford asleep on a bar stool as Barbra Streisand marveled at his impossibly, almost unbearably gorgeous visage in The Way We Were. Easygoing and without artifice, the young man in the coffee shop beguiles Susan with his charming manner. And Forlani beguiles because her flattered disbelief and discomfort is perhaps how most of us would react to someone as swoonable as Pitt. The young man in the coffee shop stirs within Susan what her father had talked of when Bill wished for her a love for the ages: "I want you to get swept away. I want you to levitate, I want you to sing with rapture and dance like a dervish. Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without."
Joe Black begins to understand those words as well as the pull of life as his time on earth progresses. As he and Susan fall for each other, Bill attempts to warn both off one another. Meet Joe Black is dominated by scenes of nearly wordless interplay. When words are spoken, they are hushed and whispered as if an increase in volume would shatter the fantasy the characters inhabit. The wordlessness places pressure on the actors to connect on a base level. And they do. Forlani, touching and lovely, shares a warm chemistry with both Pitt and Hopkins; she's worthy to share their emotional space and deserving of their characters' love. As much as I enjoyed her, however, I need for her to expand her range of expressions.
The sets are immaculate and impressive; their sumptuousness is perhaps a conscious throwback to the golden days of Hollywood, from which the story's basis originated, where sets truly were overwhelming works of art. A favorite moment has Bill escorting Joe to his quarters and pointing out the surroundings -- a lamp here, a table there, a sauna. . . A sauna? In the room, no less! It's that kind of touch that clues you of the film's roots in fantasy despite the film's dealings with topics grounded in reality. But no matter. If you give yourself over to the well-balanced illusion director Martin Brest and his scriptwriters have concocted, then your appetite for romance will be sated. And isn't romance a suspension of the head, anyway?
Aside from the romance, there's satisfaction to be found in the subplots, most notably Allison's perpetual aim to please her father. In the film's most tearjerking scene, Allison shares with her father her awareness that she will always be second best in his eyes: "You're allowed to have favorites," she says. "The point is you're mine." With that scene and with Harden's playing of it, a stock character sprouts dimensions. Hopkins once again uses the musicality of his voice -- relish the rhythms with which he delivers his lines -- to maximum effect. His cultivated ruggedness and rascally civility contrast well with Pitt's country boy charm.
Pitt has often been described in interviews or magazine articles as possessed of a bygone sense of courtliness. Often laconic and monosyllabic, but capable of terse spurts of straight shooting thoughts, Pitt has translated his traits from the verbal to the physical: Joe is stiff in his comportment but his mind and pores are receptive to every new sense, sight and sound. As his enrapturement with both life and Susan increases, so too does Pitt's soulfulness. But Joe never forgets his station. The wide-eyed innocent is a countenance, after all -- it's still skeleton and scythe underneath, though threats are intoned in a jarringly polite manner.
In the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday, on which Meet Joe Black is loosely based, the very act of death took a holiday -- suicides survived, fires claimed no victims, etc. -- but that's an aspect Brest overlooks. In the original, death is disguised as a handsome prince (Fredric March) who does reveal his true identity to his host's daughter (Evelyn Venable). In the finale, she agrees to return with him. Susan and Joe remain together but in quite a different, and somewhat more complex, turn of events. Brest has reshifted and expanded the focus of the original in a nearly three hour meditation of love, life, death, connection and reconnection. It doesn't quite surpass the original but it's certainly as wonderful an effort, with a sense of purpose and philosophical ambition lacking in most mainstream Hollywood romances.
Meet Joe Black
Directed by: Martin Brest
Written by: Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, Kevin Wade, Bo Goldman; based on Maxwell Anderson and Gladys Lehman's screenplay Death Takes a Holiday
Starring: Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Claire Forlani, Marcia Gay Harden, Jake Weber, Jeffrey Tambor
