Meet Joe Black
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Meet Joe Black is a 1998 American romantic fantasy film directed and produced by Martin Brest, and starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, and Claire Forlani. The screenplay by Bo Goldman, Kevin Wade, Ron Osborn and Jeff Reno is loosely based on the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday, one of the adaptation of the 1924 Italian play La Morte in Vacanza by Alberto Casella.
The film features a Jamaican woman who calls the title character an "obeah man" (translated as "evil spirit") until she has learned that he is in fact a personification of Death.
Plot
Billionaire media mogul Bill Parrish is considering a merger between his company and another media giant and is about to celebrate his 65th birthday with an elaborate party planned by his elder daughter, Allison. His younger daughter, Susan, a resident in internal medicine, is in a relationship with one of Bill's board members, Drew. She is considering marriage, but Bill can tell that she is not passionately in love. He appeals to his daughter to wait for love that will come out of nowhere and sweep her off of her feet. When she asks for the short version of his impassioned speech, he simply says, "Stay open. Who knows? Lightning could strike!" When their company helicopter lands, he continues to hear a mysterious voice, which he tries with increasing difficulty to ignore. When he arrives in his office, Bill has sharp pains in his chest and hears the disembodied voice again, saying, "Yes."
While Susan is studying in a coffee shop, a vibrant young man takes an interest in her and diverts her attention. He uses the same words her father said, that "lightning may strike" a relationship between them. She seems stunned to recall the phrase her father had used to encourage her to truly fall in love. She is equally enamored but departs without getting his name. Unbeknownst to her, the man is struck by multiple cars in a fatal collision.
That evening, the disembodied voice is heard again when Bill steps away from the family dinner and is alone in a room. Slowly materializing into view, the voice identifies itself as Death, and is now in the uninjured body of the flirty young man. Death explains that Bill's impassioned speech to his daughter has piqued his interest. Given Bill's "competence, experience, and wisdom," Death says that for as long as Bill will be his guide on Earth, Bill will not have to die. They both return to the dinner table and under pressure to make an introduction, clumsily make up a name for Death. Death is introduced to the family as "Joe Black." Joe Black, having no sophisticated human qualities, doesn't seem to know how to drink, eat or why food and utensils are used. He later wanders through the palatial house to adapt. Susan tries to understand his intentions, noting that his character is not the same.
Bill's best efforts to navigate the next few days, knowing them now to be his last, fail to keep events from going rapidly out of his control. Drew is secretly conspiring with a man bidding for Parrish Communications. He capitalizes on Bill's strange behavior and unexplained reliance on Joe to convince the board of directors to vote Bill out as chairman, using information given to him inadvertently by Bill's son-in-law, Quince, to push through approval for the merger which Bill had decided to oppose. Quince is devastated.
Susan is intrigued by the naive wonderment of Joe, so different from the character of the young man she met in the coffee shop. She slowly falls deeply in love with him. With that, Joe is now under the influence of human desires in his magnetic attraction to her. Bill inadvertently walks in and sees the magnetism. As they make love, Joe asks Susan, "What do we do now?" She replies, "It'll come to us." Now Bill angrily confronts Joe about his relationship with his daughter, but Joe declares his intention to take Susan with him for his own. But at Susan's hospital, Joe responds to a terminally ill old woman who wishes to pass away. She understands who he is and after he confesses his love for Susan to this woman, and they connect over the meaning of life as she helps him understand that he is dangerously meshing two worlds.
As Bill's birthday arrives, he appeals to Joe to recognize the meaning of true love and all it encompasses, especially honesty and sacrifice. Joe comes to understand that he must set aside his own desire and allow Susan to live her life. He also helps Bill regain control of his company, exposing Drew's underhanded business dealings to the board by claiming to be an agent of the Internal Revenue Service and threatening to put Drew in jail.
At the party, Bill, understanding his moment of death is to come, makes his peace with his daughters. Susan tells Joe that she has loved him ever since that day in the coffee shop. Joe hints that his time there is coming to an end.
Joe recognizes that Susan loves the unknown man, not him, and the realization crushes him. Conflicted, he holds back in telling Susan who he really is, but it seems she intuits something mystical about his identity. Struggling to comprehend the magnitude of their attraction, Susan declines to comprehend Joe as Death. She sputters, "You're, you're Joe." He promises her "you will always have what you found in the coffee shop. Thank you for loving me." In their father/daughter dance, they also seem to say goodbye. Then, eventually, on a hilltop in the grounds above the party, Bill expresses trepidation to Joe, asking "Should I be afraid?" Joe replies "Not a man like you." Fireworks explode in the distance while Susan watches Joe and her father walk on to the heavens.
Then Susan stands stunned as "Joe" reappears alone and looking bewildered, this time the embodiment of the young man in the coffee shop. He is uninjured and cannot comprehend where he is. Susan accepts that her father is gone, and the magical love that she had shared with this young man. "What do we do now?" she asks. "It'll come to us," he replies, as the two descend hand-in-hand toward the twinkling lights of the party.
Cast
- Brad Pitt as Death/Joe Black/Young Man in Coffee Shop
- Anthony Hopkins as Bill Parrish
- Claire Forlani as Susan Parrish
- Jake Weber as Drew
- Marcia Gay Harden as Allison Parrish
- Jeffrey Tambor as Quince, Allison Parrish's husband
- David S. Howard as Eddie Sloane
- Lois Kelly Miller as Jamaican Woman
- Marylouise Burke as Lillian
- June Squibb as Helen
