The chick flick that never ends

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 1998)

First of all, let me say I'm not a romance fan. A friend recommended this film to me, and I am a big fan of Anthony Hopkins...I'm even willing to admit that I sorta like Brad Pitt, though I'm not female. But whoa...even granted my admitted skepticism and dislike of this particular genre, I found very little to like about "Meet Joe Black". Direction: missing. Editing: did the editor just take a long lunch break? There's no need for this movie to be 3 hours long. Take out the long lingering shots of Brad Pitt alone and the film would lose an hour. Music: ouch. Sappy, too much, too loud, far too manipulative. But the basic problem with the film is Brad Pitt. He's just awful. No direction, no focus, no development, no goals.Maybe I'm missing the attraction of watching a guy like Pitt fumble around embarrassingly and pretend like he's experiencing everything for the first time; as I said, I'm not a woman. But for me, Brad Pitt was absolute dead weight in this film, which makes for a bit of a sticky situation as he's one of the leads. The writing, on the other hand, was even worse. Hackneyed, trite, generic, cliched, tired; at times frankly insulting. Hopkins managed to save much of the script from itself (at least his bits), but these guys (Osborn and Reno) have little or no grasp of decent dialogue. Claire Forlani is certainly beautiful, but her facial expressions became tiresome fast, bordering on gimmicky before the film was half over (why CAN'T she make eye contact even once in awhile? She was like the lead singer of "the Bangles"). Hopkins is marvelous, however; he truly is one of the finest performers of this or any other generation. I would rank this among the most workmanlike performances from him I've seen; given the atrocious script he had to work with. For me the bright spot of the film (outside of the pure joy of watching Anthony Hopkins perform) was Marcia Gay Harden and Jeffrey Tambor. They were terrific. Harden's desperate need for her father's love and attention; Tambor's bumbling naivety and love for his wife; and Hopkins' endearing, dignified love for his daughters (Hopkins truly is, as Harden says, "a wonderful father") are the things I'll take away from this film, almost in and of themselves enough to save the film for me. But not quite. Maybe I just don't get it.