Meet Joe Black . Newcity Chicago . 11-16-98

Meet Joe Black

DIRECTED BY: Martin Brest

REVIEWED: 11-16-98

The regal Anthony Hopkins plays William Parrish, an Olympian news industrialist whose imminent heart attack is signaled in "Meet Joe Black" by the cardiac equivalent of car bombs booming in his ears. Before this magnate's clock stops, though, Death indulges Its curiosity about lifeÑthe phenomenon, not the publication. Death incarnates Itself in the body of a blonde newcomer freshly felled in New York City traffic just after hitting on Parrish's daughter Susan. That young Man is Brad Pitt. As Death, he goes by Joe Black in this mordant riff on mortality. The widower Parrish and Susan, a sylph of a physician played by Claire Forlani ("Basquiat"'s girlfriend) become Joe's tutors. Pitt's performance as a buff abstraction is just one of the rewards of this lovingly crafted three-hour drama as he echoes Peter Seller's turn as a naif in "Being There" when unmannered Joe Black learns truisms about death and taxes and about money. He also tastes peanut butter for the first time and loses his virginity in an achingly chaste love scene that catches fire in inspired close-ups of eyes. Martin Brest produced and directed this fable that was "suggested by the play 'Death Takes a Holiday,'" as a closing credit states. The unusually smooth screenplay--coming from four screenwriters whose various credits include "Working Girl," "Scent of a Woman" and the television series "Moonlighting"--peddles a tony take on the Puritan ethos.

--Bill Stamets

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