1998 in Review: "Meet Joe Black"

In which Brad Pitt finally lives up to his surname

Those who know the name Martin Brest—and only industry insiders and hardcore cinephiles do—remember the director as a lost man. The Bronx-born director made three hugely successful films in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, although each one took a different path to its place in the canon. 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop was an immediate smash, with most of the credit and attention going to its ascendant star, Eddie Murphy. 1988’s Midnight Run was a more modest hit, but it has grown in estimation over the years; long before De Niro’s shameless mugging phase, the film finds him layering comedic warmth over his tough guy persona. It’s actually his best performance. Finally, there was 1992’s Scent of a Woman, in which Brest ascended to Oscar glory. He didn’t win an Oscar for himself (although he was nominated for Best Director and Best Picture), but he was a winner by association: he directed Al Pacino to his long-awaited, first-ever Academy Award.

Despite these successes, Brest’s name has since become synonymous with failure, otherwise known as Gigli, the painful 2003 rom-com starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez as a mobster and his kidnap victim. The film came at the height of the “Bennifer” phenomenon—photos of the couple out in public were unavoidable at the time—and the public was just ready to turn on them. It didn’t help that the film was terrible: poorly plotted, unfunny, with no chemistry between its stars, and a portrayal of intellectual disability by a non-disabled actor (The Hangover’s Justin Bartha) that looked horrible in 2003 and even worse now with our increased sensitivity to issues of representation.

Brest hasn’t directed a movie since, so people assume that it was Gigli that killed Brest’s career, but the failure of his earlier film, 1998’s Meet Joe Black, was equally devastating to his prospects. It’s hard to overcome two consecutive bombs. Meet Joe Black had a fantastic premise in which Death takes human form and demands a wealthy media mogul be his guide on a short tour of the human world. It had the hottest actors: Anthony Hopkins as the mogul, Claire Forlani as his beautiful daughter, and Brad Pitt as the Grim Reaper. The budget was enormous: $90 million. So were expectations. It was a disaster on every level.

We must start with Pitt. It’s easy to understand why he got the role. Casting the world’s most beautiful man as Death is a draw. Beautiful Death—the very idea ripples with meaning. More specifically, he makes sense as a beautiful cipher that can make a fragile young woman swoon without the benefit of a soul. As an actor, Pitt is both charismatic and a little vacuous, so when you take away his charisma—his Death is an empty vessel—there is simply nothing left. Yes, he has that perfect hair, glacier-blue eyes, and chiseled jaw, and it’s all very pleasant to look at. But every second he is onscreen in Meet Joe Black, his presence is working against the film’s attempts at drama, romance, and even comedy. Maybe there’s some recency bias at play here, but I would much rather see an actor like Michael Fassbender in this role. In the recently-released The Killer, he plays a contract killer who believes he is empty but is roiling with love and loss, placid on the surface with a surging current of vengeance underneath. That’s Death.

To be fair to Pitt, he’s not the only problem with Meet Joe Black, just the most visible one. Every character is drastically underwritten, an inexplicable sin in a three-hour movie. As William Parrish, Hopkins relies on rascally charm to fill in the gaps of a character who has somehow risen to the top of the business world with the soul of a romantic. “Forget your head and listen to your heart,” he tells his daughter at one point, which seems like the kind of thing a poet might say, not a billionaire whose birthday party is attended by the numerous U.S. Senators. Perhaps we could extrapolate that Parrish become more tender after the death of his wife, but that’s not on the page or the screen. There is no discussion of any change in him, and no explanation of who he was earlier in life.

Claire Forlani is unfathomably beautiful and fragile and pale, and I won’t deny that there is some pleasure in watching her and Pitt make googly eyes at each other, but there’s nothing resembling a character there. Same goes for her evil fiancée (Jake Weber), who schemes to steal the company out from under Parrish and is tasked with uttering nonsensical dialogue like, “Wake up and smell the thorns.” Only Marcia Gay Harden, as Parrish’s other daughter, and Jeffrey Tambor, as her dumb but big-hearted husband, escape unscathed. They have just as little to work with as the rest of the cast---okay, maybe more than Pitt---but they are at least believable as human beings.

But I’ve saved the Brest for last. It’s easy to see how the creative instincts that made Scent of a Woman so watchable betrayed him here. Both films are essentially two-handers between an old, wise gentleman and a young, naïve one. Both films declare at the outset that they will end in the older man’s death. They both revel in a culture of wealth, although in Scent of a Woman the characters are merely tourists in the land of the one-percenters, staying at the Waldorf Astoria and driving Ferraris, while William Parrish’s absurdly lavish lifestyle is so omnipresent and blandly rendered that it hardly registers. Brest never seems to decide how he feels about Parrish’s wealth. Either you want people to live vicariously through him, or it should look like a prison of affluence. Somehow, Brest ends up with neither. He chronicles the opulence of Parrish’s world without ever considering what it tells us about his character---or his story.

So why did I think I loved this movie? I had seen Meet Joe Black once or twice as a young man, and all I could remember from those viewings are the film’s few powerful moments. The flirting between Forlani and Pitt in the early scenes (he plays a normal guy before Death kills him and takes over his body) is pretty adorable. A late sequence in which Weber’s evil machinations are exposed and punished has an all-time great kicker (“Death and taxes”). And I was moved all over again by the final exchange between Parish and Death as they walk to the Other Side: “Should I be afraid?” Parish asks. “Not a man like you,” replies Death.  Imagine learning that A) there is a Hell, and B) you’re not going there—all in a few seconds. That’s got to feel great, and Hopkins’s triumphant little grin always tickles me.

But in between these moments is a whole lot of empty air. I think of the scene in which Harden’s character, who has been planning her father’s birthday party for weeks and is desperate for any recognition from him, presents a cake tasting after dinner one evening. Her father is completely uninterested, and it’s the last straw. She breaks down and cries, while her husband tries in vain to comfort her. Her father finally sees her pain and solves it, dramatically taking a bite of cake and faux-swooning at its deliciousness.  The daughter is somehow moved by her father’s gesture, and the family laughs it off. The cake—and the scene—reveals everything that’s wrong with Meet Joe Black. It’s sweet and sumptuous and nearly empty. High in calories and entirely lacking in sustenance.