Death Be Not Proud

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Pale and cadaverous, cowled and carrying a scythe? No, no, it's just so...medieval. You can't personify death that way anymore. Our age demands something hunkier, less menacing, sort of a surfer dude to help us catch the curl of our last wave gracefully.

To borrow a phrase (and a pseudonym), meet Joe Black, as played by Brad Pitt, who has a real gift for standing around looking cute and stupid. He appears, along with chest pains and some numbness in the left arm, at an inconvenient moment in the life of an even more unlikely figure--a media mogul with a conscience--named William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins). Parrish is fighting off a takeover bid from a less savory rival and grouchily submitting to having his 65th birthday celebrated at one of those parties of the century that seem to occur once a month in our better social circles.

Obligingly, Death agrees to take a short break from his grim reapings in order to let Bill wind up his affairs in an orderly fashion. In return, he asks only that his victim teach him something about life. It does not occur to director Martin Brest and the raft of screenwriters employed on this enterprise that this is an illogical request. Who would know more about life than the figure who confronts us in our final moments, when all pride, all pomp, all defenses are stripped away?

But then they've set him to knocking on the wrong door anyway. What do people as privileged as Parrish and his family, at least as they are presented in Meet Joe Black, know about life? Mostly they are observed dressed to the nines, eating delicately prepared viands and enjoying life in either a Manhattan penthouse, where one prays the swimming pool does not spring a leak and ruin the library's first editions, or a riverside mansion, where the helicopter pad blends nicely into the landscape. There is no rage, pain or panic in any of these venues, and no wild laughter either. There are only the muttered discontents of the well favored.

In time their servants help Death discover the joys of peanut butter. In time Bill's serious daughter Susan (Claire Forlani)--you know she's serious because she works as a doctor instead of as an aromatherapist--helps him discover the joys of sex. In return he helps Bill fend off his corporate enemies and even allows him time to make a nice exit speech at his birthday bash before gently conducting him, through a shower of fireworks--anything for a big finish--to a world that, frankly, cannot possibly be better than the one he's leaving.

Brest thinks he needs three endless hours to turn Death into a glam and fully cuddlesome character. And as we watch his movie (a remake of 1934's blessedly brief Death Takes a Holiday, in which Fredric March played the title role) slowly disappear into the blond hole of Pitt's affectlessness, we have plenty of time to observe just how profoundly he has misconceived Death. As anyone whose house he has visited can tell you, he's a vicious, merciless anarchist. Maybe Max von Sydow is now all wrong for the part. And we can certainly be glad Robin Williams didn't get it. But there is Jim Carrey, who is right for the role and can open bad pictures too.

--R.S.