Meet Joe Black
USA 1998
Reviewed by Geoffrey Macnab
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
A few days before his sixty-fifth birthday, media tycoon William Parrish begins to hear voices but is too busy with his company's merger with a rival to pay attention. His daughter Susan is chatted up by a handsome stranger in a coffee shop. After they go their separate ways, the man is hit by a car and killed.
At dinner, Parrish is visited by Death who has taken the body of the stranger killed outside the coffee shop. Wanting to spend some time on earth, Death allows Parrish a few extra days of life. Parrish introduces the stranger to his family as Joe Black. Susan is astonished that Joe doesn't remember their earlier encounter.
When Parrish scraps his merger plans, his colleagues believe that Joe - who accompanies Parrish wherever he goes - is responsible. Parrish's deputy Drew, who is also Susan's fiancé, stages a boardroom coup and deposes Parrish. Meanwhile, Joe and Susan fall in love.
Joe warns Parrish that his time is almost up. Joe wants to take Susan with him to the other side, although it will mean her death. At his birthday party, Parrish discovers he was double-crossed by Drew, whom he confronts. The other board members promise to safeguard the company. Joe tells Parrish he won't be taking Susan with him after all. The two men leave the party. As Susan is looking for them, Joe appears but can't explain how he got there. Susan realises that this is the original man she met in the coffee shop, whom Joe has allowed to come back to life in his stead.
Review
Pitched in some grey purgatory between screwball comedy and metaphysical romance, Meet Joe Black suffers from a severe identity crisis. Director Martin Brest (inspired to make the film by Mitchell Lieson's 1934 Death Takes a Holiday) starts with the flimsiest of conceits and embellishes an epic three-hour tale around it. Joe Black may be a rarity - a big-budget studio picture that is character-led, not effects-driven - but it's still weighed down by its own solemnity.
The early scenes work best. Anthony Hopkins is well cast as Parrish, the benevolent patriarch troubled by an inner voice intimating his own death. He is a media mogul, but a good-natured and lyrical one with a flair for poetic language. When he dispenses fatherly advice to his daughter Susan, he sounds like Richard Burton declaiming Dylan Thomas poetry. As he suffers his heart attack - a genuinely frightening scene, shot in juddering close-ups - Susan's encounter with a dishevelled stranger in a coffee shop is handled with spontaneity and charm.
But just as the film looks set to develop into a likable romance along the lines of Sliding Doors, cracks begin to appear. By bringing Brad Pitt back as a not-so-grim reaper, the scriptwriters raise all sorts of questions which they never really answer. Why, for instance, does Death need Parrish's assistance to see around the world?
There is some neatly observed comedy when Parrish introduces Death to his family, but it is still hard to work out what Joe is supposed to represent. Pitt plays him in the same way that Nicolas Cage did the angel in City of Angels - that's to say deadpan and charming, almost like a silent film star. On those few occasions when Joe does speak, it's only to repeat a question that has just been asked or to thank his hosts.
When Sting played the Devil in Dennis Potter's Brimstone & Treacle, his beatific good looks made him seem all the more diabolic. Here, nice is as nice does - every so often, Joe might affect a deep voice and threaten to take Parrish away before his time, but we know he is an all-American boy at heart who likes peanut butter and cookies too much to do anything evil. And he's certainly preferable to Susan's other suitor, the oleaginous businessman Drew (Jake Weber), whom Joe effortlessly antagonises.
Parrish himself, though played with gravity and pathos by Hopkins, is a surprisingly one-dimensional hero. There is no tension about his struggle with Death. He's not covetous, or desperate for a few extra days of life to atone for past misdeeds. Rich as Croesus, he is also wise, kind-hearted and despises making money for its own sake. Given that the film's poor performance in the US was partly responsible for Universal boss Casey Silver losing his job, there's more than a hint of irony about his business philosophy.
The longer Joe sticks around, the mushier the film becomes. His hesitancy and eccentric ways enrapture Susan: I love your smell, he tells her, as if invoking the memory of Al Pacino's courtship technique in Brest's earlier hit, Scent of a Woman (1992). In the lovers' scenes together, Pitt gets the best close-ups: he is the object of desire, not Forlani. When Susan falls in love with Joe despite realising that he is not the man she met in the coffee shop, you're left with the impression that anybody in Brad Pitt's body would bowl her over, an impression the bizarre and unsatisfactory ending does nothing to change.
Credits
- Producer
- Martin Brest
- Screenplay
- Ron Osborn
- Jeff Reno
- Kevin Wade
- Bo Goldman
- Suggested by the play Death Takes a Holiday written by Alberto Casella, English adaptation by Walter Ferris; and the motion picture screenplay by
- Maxwell Anderson
- Gladys Lehman
- Director of Photography
- Emmanuel Lubezki
- Editors
- Joe Hutshing
- Michael Tronick
- Production Designer
- Dante Ferretti
- Music
- Thomas Newman
- ©Universal City Studios, Inc
- Production Companies
- Universal Pictures presents a City Light Films production
- Executive Producer
- Ronald L. Schwary
- Co-producer
- David Wally
- Associate Producer
- Celia Costas
- Production Associate
- Stephen Whelan
- Production Co-ordinator
- Monica Levinson
- Unit Production Manager
- Celia Costas
- Location Manager
- Declan Baldwin
- Location Co-ordinator
- Laura Franses
- Post-production Supervisors
- Debbi Bossi
- Jessie Ward
- Assistant Directors
- Amy Sayres
- Christopher J. Surgent
- Laura Cercone Fiorino
- Rhode Island:
- Terry Ham
- Script Supervisor
- Lisa Katcher
- Casting
- Juliet Taylor
- Ellen Lewis
- Associate:
- Patricia Kerrigan
- ADR Voice:
- Barbara Harris
- Camera Operators
- Craig Dibona
- Additional:
- William Coleman
- Video Co-ordinator
- Sara Corrigan
- Special Visual Effects
- Industrial Light &s Magic
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Michael Owens
- Visual Effects Associate Producer:
- Ginger Theisen
- Compositing Supervisor:
- Jon Alexander
- Rotoscope Lead Artist:
- Jack Mongovan
- Visual Effects Editor:
- David Tanaka
- Visual Effects Executive Producer:
- Chrissie England
- Special Effects
- Connie Brink
- Rhode Island Unit Fireworks
- Pyro Spectaculars
- Co-ordinator:
- Ron Smith
Model Maker- Elizabeth Popiel
- Art Director
- Robert Guerra
- Set Decorator
- Leslie Bloom
- Storyboard Artist
- John F. Davis
- Costume Designers
- Aude Bronson-Howard
- David C. Robinson
- Wardrobe Supervisors
- Susan J. Wright
- Barbara J. Hause
- Key Make-up Artists
- Richard Dean
- Randy Houston Mercer
- Key Hairstylists
- Lyndell Quiyou
- Beth Miller
- Hairstylist
- Stephen G. Bishop
- Titles/Opticals
- Pacific Title/Mirage
- Orchestrations
- Thomas Pasatieri
- Party Music Orchestrations/Conductor
- Chris Boardman
- Music Editors
- Bill Bernstein
- Angie Rubin
- Temp Track:
- Curt Sobel
- Music Scoring Mixer
- Dennis Sands
- Soundtrack
- "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails", "Let's Face the Music and Dance", "Isn't This a Lovely Day", "Cheek to Cheek" by Irving Berlin; "Our Love Is Here to Stay" by George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin; "Lovely to Look At" by Dorothy Fields, Jerome Kern, Jimmy McHugh; "Can't Help Loving Dat Man" by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II; "Where or When" by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart; "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" by Harry Warren, Al Dubin; "Anything Goes" by Cole Porter; "Happy Birthday to You" by Mildred J. Hill, Patty S. Hill; "What a Wonderful World" by George David Weiss, Bob Thiele; "Over the Rainbow" by E.Y. Harburg, Harold Arlen/"What a Wonderful World" by George David Weiss, Bob Thiele, performed by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
- Dance Consultant
- Rhode Island Unit:
- Jerry Mitchell
- Sound Mixer
- Danny Michael
- Re-recording Mixers
- Chris Jenkins
- Ron Bartlett
- Mark Smith
- Recordists
- Mark Narramore
- Sam Kaufman
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Scott A. Hecker
- Dialogue Editors
- Gary Lewis
- Benjamin Beardwood
- Ralph Osborn
- Sound Effects Editors
- Eric A. Norris
- Joe Earle
- Linda Keim
- Ken Johnson
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Carey Stratton
- Mixer:
- Dean Drabin
- Supervising Editor:
- Joe Dorn
- Editors:
- Allen Hartz
- Jeff Rosen
- Barbara Issak
- David Melhase
- Matthew Sawelson
- Lauren Palmer
- Foley
- Artists:
- Sarah Monat
- Robin Harlan
- Recordists:
- Don Givens
- Jim Stewart
- Mixer:
- Marilyn Graf Hubbard
- Editors:
- John Murray
- John Benson
- Dan Yale
- Lawrence H. Mann
- Voice Processing
- Geoffrey G. Rubay
- Aerial Co-ordinator
- Peter J. McKernan
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Buddy Joe Hooker
- Armouries Managers
- Jeremy D. Pratt
- Irapaul Xavier Turner
- Cast
- Brad Pitt
- Joe Black/young man in coffee shop
- Anthony Hopkins
- William Parrish
- Claire Forlani
- Susan Parrish
- Jake Weber
- Drew
- Marcia Gay Harden
- Allison
- Jeffrey Tambor
- Quince
- David S. Howard
- Eddie Sloane
Lois Kelly-Miller- Jamaican woman
- Jahnni St. John
- Jamaican woman's daughter
- Richard Clarke
- butler
- Marylouise Burke
- Lillian
- Diane Kagan
- Jennifer
- June Squibb
- Helen
- Gene Canfield
- construction foreman
- Suzanne Hevner
- florist
- Steve Coats
- electrician
- Madeline N. Balmaceda
- Madeline
- Julie Lund
- Drew's secretary
- Kay Gaffney
- Anthony Kane
- Joe H. Lamb
- Robert C. Lee
- Jim McNickle
- Hardy Phippen Jr
- boardmembers
- Stephen Adly-Guirgis
- hospital receptionist
- Leo Marks
- party waiter
- Michelle Youell
- Gene Leverone
- party guests
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
- 16,256 feet
- 180 minutes 37 seconds
- Dolby digital/SDDS/Digital DTS sound
- Colour by
- DeLuxe