Meet Joe Black (1998)

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Meet Joe Black is the Martin Brest-directed supernatural romance that became a sharply polarizing studio release of the late 1990s.

Brest directed. Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, Kevin Wade, and Bo Goldman wrote the screenplay, remaking the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday from the 1924 Alberto Casella play. Anthony Hopkins plays William Parrish, a media mogul approaching his sixty-fifth birthday. Brad Pitt plays Death, who arrives in the body of a recently-killed young man to escort Parrish to the afterlife but agrees to first experience human life.

Claire Forlani plays Susan Parrish, William’s daughter who falls for the young man before realizing what Joe Black is. Jake Weber plays Drew, William’s corporate rival and Susan’s fiancé. Marcia Gay Harden plays Allison, William’s older daughter. The plot follows Death’s gradual education in human experience and the consequences of his attachment to Susan.

I’m split right down the middle on this one. Hopkins gives me a man worth spending three hours with, and Pitt gives me a Death I never quite believe anyone could fall for. When the film stays with Parrish, I’m moved. When it turns to the romance, I start wondering how much is left.

The film made approximately one hundred and forty-three million dollars worldwide on a ninety million dollar budget.

The commercial performance was modest given the budget and the Pitt-Hopkins casting. The critical reception was negative. The film ran one hundred and seventy-eight minutes, which most reviewers identified as excessive. It’s one of the more divisive late-1990s romances. Defenders cite the Hopkins performance and the central premise. Critics cite the runtime, the pacing, and the central romance’s plausibility issues. Both positions have heavy evidence.

The Hopkins Performance

Anthony Hopkins plays William Parrish as a successful man preparing for his own death. The performance is the film’s foundation and its most consistent craft achievement. Hopkins refuses the actor-friendly speeches that the script repeatedly offers him. He plays Parrish as a man whose wisdom is observational instead of declamatory. The character listens more than he speaks. The audience reads Parrish’s calibration through small physical choices: the pace of his speech, the steadiness of his eye contact, the deliberation of his decisions.

The performance holds the film together through stretches the script can’t justify.

The board-meeting sequences, the family dinner sequences, and the closing birthday party sequence all depend on Hopkins’s ability to make Parrish read as a man worth Death’s interest. The work is one of the more underrated late-career performances in Hopkins’s catalog. The film around the performance doesn’t consistently match its commitment.

Hopkins is the reason I’d sit through this film at all. He turns down every speech the script hands him, and that restraint is what I admire most in the whole production. A lesser actor would have grabbed those speeches, and the film would have turned into a greeting card.

The Pitt Problem

Brad Pitt plays Death-as-Joe-Black with an affected innocence that divides audiences.

The character is meant to be experiencing human sensation for the first time. Pitt plays the inexperience through slowed speech, deliberate physical movements, and wide-eyed reactions to ordinary sights. The performance commits to the choice consistently. The choice itself is the question. Some viewers read the performance as artful. Others read it as artificial in ways that prevent investment in the central romance.

The Joe Black character is structurally difficult. He has to be alien enough that the audience reads Death through him and human enough that the audience can believe Susan falls for him, and the two demands pull against each other. Pitt leans toward the alien, and I think that’s the wrong call. The slowed speech and wide eyes seem mannered to me, and once I stop believing Susan’s interest, the romance at the center of the film goes cold.

The Runtime

The film’s one hundred and seventy-eight-minute runtime is its most-discussed structural problem. The 1934 source material runs seventy-nine minutes. The Casella play covers similar ground in about ninety minutes of stage time.

Meet Joe Black takes nearly twice as long to tell the same story. The expansion is partly justified (William’s professional and family life requires setup) and partly unjustified (multiple sequences extend beyond their narrative function).

The pacing problems hit different stretches differently. The first hour sets up Parrish’s world and Death’s arrival at a deliberate but functional pace. The middle hour, with the romance and the corporate subplot, is where the film loses me.

It slows to a crawl and I stop caring about the boardroom maneuvering. The third hour recovers. I’d have cut the film to about two hours, and I think it would be a much stronger picture for it.

Is Meet Joe Black worth watching?

6/10. Hopkins gives a performance the film around him can’t match, and that mismatch is why I land at a 6. The runtime is bloated, the romance never convinces me, and I get restless through the middle hour. The birthday party is the best stretch in the picture and nearly redeems the rest. Watch it for Hopkins doing committed work in a flawed vehicle, and watch Death Takes a Holiday (1934) if you want the story at a sane length.

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