It goes by in a blink

Rating: 7/10 (14 February 2014)

The two main characters in this movie are Death and Bill Parish (Anthony Hopkins). The conceit is that death takes human form for a while to experience human existence in various ways, blackmailing urbane, rich, successful Bill to be his guide. Death takes a holiday. The Angel of Death, the Grim Reaper, in this movie isBrad Pitt. Of course, Joe and Bill's daughter fall for each other.
This meaningful movie has a number of profound themes. The main theme is the acceptance of death — not a light subject for a feel-good Hollywood movie, but it works well enough. A second theme is Bill's simple message to live life to its fullest, with no regrets, because your years "go by in a blink". (Isn't that true!) Another extended theme is the father-daughter bond.
I found this to be a melancholic and slow movie. I was willing to go along with the "Death walks among us" conceit, but Bill was a little too quick to accept Joe for who he was. The heart attack scenes didn't impress it on me enough.
Hopkins, Forlani, Harden and Tambor were quite good. Pitt was strongest in the scenes with the Jamaican woman. I didn't really enjoy Brad Pitt in this film, although he played his role well enough for it not to ruin the film for me. I'm not sure whether it was him or the lines given to his character. The Pinocchio-becomes-a-real-boy idea has been done before, and that's essentially what this was.
It is clever to see death as a looming, almost-human presence that accompanies us as we get fatally ill or very old; however, if death were to become Death, I don't think it would be like this.
Interestingly, 15 years after its release, the film is being shown on Valentine's Day and billed as a sort of archetypal love story. I suppose it is a grand love story, but I found it hard to get a handle on that aspect. I kept looking for a meaning of some kind in the love story, eg infatuation as a form of suicide; le grand mort découvert le petit mort, that sort of thing. This film falls into the categories of (effective) tear-jerker and chick flick (complete with a shot of Pitt's abs), but at times it became a little too silly and unrealistic for me.
I'd see this movie unless chick flicks, slow-paced films, long films, and tearjerkers are absolutely not your thing. Like it or not, we all struggle with death. I'd like to see more films that help us to understand death (rather than just showing it)