Issue #02/57, January 28 - February 10, 1999  

Well kids, it's time to hide your hash stashes, because Brad Pitt's in town again. Not literally, of course--but these days the vaguely crisp images produced by the circa-1993 projection equipment at Moscow's top cinemas are about all the reality some of us can stomach. While some Hollywood pundits are busy debating whether Mr. Pitt's career can survive the worldwide teen-heartthrob hegemony of Leonardo Di Caprio, Brad has taken the fan-mag setback in stride, attempting to beat Leo at his own game with a teddy bearish turn as the Grim Reaper himself in the Titanic-esque Meet Joe Black.

It's funny how many genres you can tackle in a film that clocks in at a very sluggish three hours, and it's no rhetorical stretch to say that MJB is an epic love story wrapped in a mortality fable disguised as a cautionary tale of modernization, all of which pretty much boils down to either a upper-middlebrow attempt at Michael or a thinly veiled public service announcement paid for by the American Peanut Butter Association. (I don't if such an organization actually exists, but if it does I certainly wouldn't put it past them to use Brad Pitt to hawk their nutritionally questionable product to the brace-faced girls of the world.) In MJB, these individual components vary from mediocre to ludicrous, and no matter what anyone tries to tell you, a Brad Pitt film is never greater than the sum of its parts.

Now before I get into the full-on venting of disgust, allow me to say the film does have a few cleverly staged humorous moments--I'd say there were five or six such moments in all if forced to hazard a guess. At the tail end of so much shameless schmaltz, however, I'm hard pressed to recall a single concrete detail about any of these bits. So much for comic relief.

It seems to me that the producers really fucked up when they settled on such a blandly ingratiating little title. The film's variegated subject matter and occasionally tongue-in-cheek approach give rise to a wide range of, I think, much better options. OK, so Maybe Death Gets Horny or Death Gets Laid would be a bit much for the dead-center-mainstream target demographic, but even the slightly absurd and quasi-allusive Death Turns on the Radio or the straightforward Death Takes a Vacation would have been a marked improvement. With appropriate allowances made for excess verbosity and parentheses, I think we can settle on Death Takes a (Working) Vacation as a pretty good cover-all-bases sort of compromise, especially in this era of disgruntled cubicle dwellers and vastly curtialed employment benefits. When it comes down to brass tacks, even Death is Jean Mackenzie would be more compelling than Meet Joe Black.

My specious glibness is a subterfuge, of course--there's a hell of lot more

"The dick I sucked last night was this long!"

wrong with this movie than the cineplex-friendly title or Brad Pitt. But so long as I'm mentioning Brad let's dispose of him right now. It's no secret that Pitt's all-time best performance was his brief role as the stoner in True Romance or that the intensity of angsty hunk-o-ramas like A River Runs through It, Legends of the Fall, etc., had a lot more to do with the rugged Montana scenery and Brad's bare chest than anything about his screen presence in the abstract sense. MJB, meanwhile, takes place exclusively in Manhattan and Long Island and, despite the protracted runtime, Brad's bare chest is clearly visible for all of about 30 seconds. Sassy readers (or rather, the defunct rag's former readers) will definitely not be satisfied.

And anybody who buys Brad as Death just isn't paying attention. For most of the film, the Great Equalizer is reduced to a smirking junk-food consumer with "all the passion of a pair of titmice" as Anthony Hopkins says early on with a patrician American accent, albeit in a slightly different context. In the few Feel My Wrath interludes where Brad really gets to flex his atrophied acting muscles, the resulting fury would have trouble instilling fear in even a pair of passionless titmice, to pointlessly repeat a metaphor that has all the passion of ... well I think you get the picture.

The handling of Death's hypothetical sex life is half-baked at best. Greek mythology-type physio-philosophical questions of the feasability of god/mortal mating aside, I think few would dispute that an omnipotent being like Death would pretty much be able to pick and choose at will, with or without the body of Brad Pitt to use as bait. In this case the Grim Reaper chooses to do the nasty with--drum roll, please--that cringing daddy's girl who was maybe 27% responsible for ruining Kevin Smith's sketchy Mallrats. Not Shannen Doherty, mind you, but rather that rail-thin chick with the thick South Jersey accent and all those excruciating high-school-thespian mannerisms. I guess she has a pretty decent body and all, but given his literally infinite desirability and God's-eye-view of the available pussy, presumably it wouldn't require too much additional effort for Death to snare some truly world-class snatch. There's nothing more pathetic than wasted potential.

However, all of the film's various problems pale in comparison to the undue length. There is absolutely no sane explanation for the excessive runtime other than that these guys decided at the outset they were going to make a 3-hour fluff epic come hell or high-water. And you gotta hand it to 'em--they stuck to their guns and ended up with 180 minutes of edited, screenable footage. I'll spare you my take on the bogus Player-lite musical score, lest I start to drag on incessantly myself.

In the interests of fairness and taking into account the opinion of the general public, I feel compelled to relate the opinion of my insane, home-shopping-network and gambling-addicted aunt. (Attentive readers will recall her as the Delaware Park racetrack regular who has never forgiven Oscar voters for overlooking Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse.) Over a Christmas dinner of dry, overcooked turkey, canned cranberry sauce, and my mother's one-of-a-kind "Jell-O salad" (a highly volatile--and some say delectable--emulsion of green Jell-O and Cool Whip), aunt Diane did not hesitate to inform the taciturn group that Meet Joe Black is a "really great movie." She had already ventured out to the AMC Marple 10 on two occasions to see the film, and that was back in late December. It's entirely possible she has engaged in additional repeat viewings in the interim. Personally, I think she's especially captivated by the way the movie goes through a handful of false cadences before finally ending, which yields the crowd-pleasing and multiple-tearjerking cinematic equivalent of one of Beethoven's grand symphonic finales.