Good gracious - what a stink

Rating: Null/10 (5 June 2000)

There is no crueller thing than to force a right-thinking individual to view, in its entirety, a Merchant-Ivory film. They are ponderous and poorly cast - impossible to connect to in any way that is human, and more than likely infested with one or more of Helena Bonham Carter, Julian Sands, or Bernadette Peters. Imagine my horror then, in discovering that there is a darker pit of culturally misguided artistry in the breast of that most American of directors: Martin Brest. With a pedigree of such resoundingly poor films as Beverly Hills Cop (a film so woeful at its heart that Sylvester Stallone turned it down), Midnight Run, & Scent of a Woman, it is with an admittedly heavy heart that during my latest masochism-fest, I picked up his dream project - Meet Joe Black.
A remake of a film that I've never heard of before, 1934's Death Takes a Holiday, Brest's film is a light romantic fantasy about Death manifesting itself as Brad Pitt to see what it's like to really live. Judging by Pitt's performance, if Death really wanted to learn about life he probably should have chosen a better vehicle. Death reveals himself to Anthony Hopkins who plays Bill Parish - a successful businessman and father of two grown daughters who, on his 65th birthday, will suffer a fatal heart attack. Before that happens, Death asks Bill to act as His guide to human experience. Unpredictably, Brad Pitt's Death falls in love with Bill's youngest daughter, the very lovely but very grimace-y Claire Forlani, and finds Himself on the horns of a romantic dilemma.
Not enough plot for a three-hour film, you say? Fear not - Bill is being robbed of his corporation by a vermin go-getting, Tim-Roth-Lookalike and it's up to Death to save his legacy. He does this, not ironically, by posing as an IRS agent. Have I forgotten to mention that Pitt, at one point, imitates a Jamaican accent to better communicate with a dying old Jamaican woman? Oh yes, Claire Forlani (nurse Grimace as I like to call her), is a doctor of internal medicine and Death follows her on her rounds (HA!). Anyone that's seen Seven Years in Tibet recognizes the unadvisability of Pitt doing an accent. It would have been a nice thing if Pitt had done an imitation of a human being to better communicate with the audience.
Did I mention that this movie is actually 3 hours long? To be fair, the film is nice to look at and, were any of the actors to actually speak in a normal cadence rather than their ponderous, measured, drippy-faucet, mumbling, it would only be 90 minutes.
The film fails as a romantic drama. It fails as a romantic comedy (although the sensitive love-making scene is unintentionally hilarious, as is the scene where Pitt gets hit by two cars). It fails as a dark fantasy - and as a light fantasy. It fails as a drama of any sort - or anything that approaches whimsy or wit. Already faltering, the film grinds to a crashing halt when it attempts to handle a neurotic older sister and her competition for her father's attentions. In three hours, one has a reasonable right to expect some sort of reward. The ending, however, is a bizarre, hackneyed thing that is so poorly tacked on it resembles in spirit that paper tail of that beknighted donkey of children's party fame after the retarded cajun with the helmet has had his turn.
There are so many questions that are raised by this sad monstrosity. Chief among them:
1. why is Death, omnipotent as he is, so clumsy around people? Pitt plays him as some kind of Starman without the charming pathos (or the expected unfamiliarity of an alien with humanity). 2. why does Brad Pitt, so excellent in 12 Monkeys, Kalifornia, & Seven, suck out loud in this film? You feel like turning up the RPM's on the turntable. One wishes someone had told him the camera was on. 3. why is Anthony Hopkins in this film? I haven't seen Instinct yet, but I'm pretty sure this will be a question raised by that film as well. 4. why doesn't the daughter of the elderly Jamaican woman wonder why this young white man is mocking their accent so outrageously and poorly? 5. why did this film cost $90 million dollars and six months to make? 6. why did I watch the entire film?
There are more, but I wouldn't want to ruin it for you. The only reason, really, to watch the sad, beknighted thing is found in the marginal joy one gets from watching the hollywood very beautiful and the very rich fail spectacularly in spectacularly embarrassing ways.
Meet Joe Black is a mess of a film. It is the worst film that I've seen this week and I watched ten minutes of Vampires and all of End of Days. At one point, I switched the audio over to French and threw on the English subtitles. The acting immediately improved and the dialogue, although still idiotic and terminally stilted, was at least in French, that native tongue of the idiotic and the terminally stilted. You must realize that any film that seems good in French is probably catastrophically poor in English. You'd be right if this is what you realize.
scale of 1-100 = 10 diseases I'd rather contract than watch it again: anthrax, an explosive viral infection that occurs primarily in cattle best frame of mind to view this film in: sado-masochistic sugar delirium