Almost, but not quite...

Rating: 6/10 (27 May 2000)

There are some really good things about this movie. Pure originality is not one of them. Good taste is not quite one of them either.
The good part: The acting. Excellent. Jeffrey Tambor puts in the best performance I've ever seen from him, very natural and real. Brad Pitt's portrayal of death is simply charming. Anthony Hopkins is at the top of his form. Claire Forlani and Marcia Gay Hardin make it obvious why their characters should be loved. Jake Weber is perfectly believable.

The bad parts: the music, the recycled story (yet another in a long string of previously used material to be coughed out of Hollywood in the last five to ten years), a certain problem of taste.
The music is by Thomas Newman, the same composer who so brilliantly scored Oscar and Lucinda. You can only tell it's him because of one particular theme which seems to have been lifted whole from the score of Oscar and Lucinda. (It's so obviously similar that until I confirmed that the same composer had written both I was outraged at what I thought was an outright theft.) The rest of the score is mostly either a medley of material by popular composers or the usual boring Dolby-ized swells thrown in way too often, even to the point of destroying delicate dialog.

What is it with these Hollywood directors? What is this fashion for hiring brilliant actors and then stomping on their lines with insultingly suggestive music? Do I really need a swell of strings to tell me that dialog is poignant? that an exchange is respectful? that "these characters are Men, dammit"? Don't directors realize that Oscar winners and a decent script can usually do this -- and more -- all by themselves?
The story is hardly original. The old parts are based on a play entitled "Death Takes A Holiday." (This play was first made into a film with the same name in 1934, then into a TV movie in 1971. Why oh why did we need another remake?) The new parts appear to be cobbled together from or just mimicry of a lot of '80s and '90s movies about corporate greed and glamourous rich people. If it weren't for the acting and the beautiful sets and costumes, no one would give a second thought to any of these characters.
Which brings me to taste. Luxurious stuff everywhere on a set does not equate to good taste. Now, this will sound mean, but I don't intend meanness. Also, if the plot of this movie is not already clear as crystal to you thanks to two years of media saturation with a series of tediously explicit previews (another bad recent Hollywood trend), or from the tagline, or from the video cover itself, this might be a little bit of a spoiler, so beware. But here goes.
I love Claire Forlani's acting. Nevertheless, I think she's too thin. Most people are 10-20 pounds lighter than they appear on film. In this film, Ms. Forlani looks like she weighs about 100 lb.
Now, I think most of the women on my screen are too thin these days. However, there is something particularly disturbing about a woman so thin that you can see the articulation of her shoulder joints embracing as a lover the handsome and virile embodiment of death. Enough said.
This movie had a budget of $90m (which should have been enough to at least buy an original story idea). If the figures posted here on IMDb are accurate, it has yet to recoup more than approximately half. I hope Hollywood starts to get some messages from this kind of math. Maybe I'm not the only one watching movies who is sick of remakes, of terrifyingly thin women, and of stale and even insulting musical direction.