There is no person there for her, just the idea of perfect love. She spends most of the movie puzzling about a very odd man who briefly made her heart feel gooey. I was not, in short, sold on the relationship between Susan and Joe. His orgasm plays in slow motion across his face like a person who is thinking, this is way better than peanut butter. (As they're buffeted by their competent male lovers, I am sometimes reminded of a teenager making the cheerleader team, crossed with a new war widow.) A male actor would have to be very brave to reveal such loss of control, and Pitt's does not cry out. Actresses have become skilled over the years at faking orgasms on camera, usually with copious cries of delight and sobs of passion. That at least leads to the novelty of a rare movie love scene where the camera is focused on the man's face, not the woman's. There is no chemistry between Joe Black and Susan because both parties are focused on him. Pitt plays them as a compliment to himself. Meryl Streep once said that an experienced actor knows that the words “I love you” are really a question. Pitt is a fine actor, but this performance is a miscalculation. As both the young man in the coffee shop and as “Joe Black” (the name given him by Parrish), he is intensely aware of himself-too aware. We're distracted, anyway, by the way Brad Pitt plays the role. A job like that, you want a more experienced man. This Death doesn't even know what peanut butter tastes like, or how to kiss. Isn't Death an emissary from God? Shouldn't he know these things? He's been around a long time (one imagines him breaking the bad news to amoebas). The body of the young man is now occupied by Death, who has come to inform Parrish that his end is near.

That night at dinner, she is startled to find him among her father's guests.

They confess they really like each other. Lightning makes, at the very least, a near miss. A few hours later, in a coffee shop, she meets a stranger (Brad Pitt). He tells his beloved younger daughter Susan ( Claire Forlani) that he likes her fiance but doesn't sense that she truly loves him: “Stay open. On the brink of his 65th birthday, he senses that death is near. Less is more.Īs the movie opens, a millionaire named William Parrish ( Anthony Hopkins) is pounded by a heart attack, the soundtrack using low bass chords to assault the audience. The movie contains elements that make it very good, and a lot of other elements besides. That there is also time for scenes about sibling rivalry and a corporate takeover is not necessarily a good thing. And it is a meditation on the screen presence of Brad Pitt. It is a movie about a woman who falls in love with a concept. “Meet Joe Black” is a movie about a rich man trying to negotiate the terms of his own death.

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