Death takes a holiday and spends some time with a media mogul before he takes him away. Death falls in love with the mogul's daughter. And decides to take her too. Then doesn't. That's the entire plot. It takes takes three bum-numbing hours to tell. A stultifyingly dull, three hours which culminates in the most leadenly-paced Hollywood Bullshit ending imaginable.
Death here is played as a wide-eyed innocent abroad by Brad Pitt who manfully layers on autistic ticks and mannerisms over a wildly variable script. His character is unable (at selective 'comic' moments) to understand common idioms while, at other times, is capable of layering on the profundity and metaphor with a trowel. At one point - after being told that another character was talking through his hat says "No, he's talking through his lips!" Ho ho ho.
Claire Forlani plays the woman with whom he falls in love, and plays her with a subdued gaucheness so that in every scene she spends so much time twitching her lips (in a manner henceforth known as 'Zellwegering') and looking out of the corners of her eyes, that she looks like she's about to have a fit. The innumerable 'almost' love scenes between her and the Death character are an agony: endless alternating over-the-shoulder close ups of her twitching her eyes at everything but him, and him Aspergering his gaze at everything else in the room but her. Whole hours of this stuff go by without them looking at each other once - and then they have sex which is more of the same with fewer clothes and less dialogue.
In the end (the interminable endless end) the media mogul happily walks off with Death, after everyone has wrung every phony ounce of syrupy sentiment out of every single frame. (I nearly went into a sugar coma when Daddy and daughter had a final dance with to that saccharine hymn to trash sentimentality "What a Wonderful World") And then! (Incoming bullshit overload!) Death isn't Death anymore! He's the guy the daughter fell in love with in the first act brought back from some ill-defined afterlife by a stroke of the writer's pen. The daughter says, "I wish you could have known my dad," and off they walk to the accompaniment of glorious fireworks. All a bit sudden (well it would be if it wasn't all done so ponderously slowly) considering she hasn't even seen that her dad is dead, or, if she just somehow 'knew' it, she bothered to grieve even for a second. The poor bugger isn't even cold yet! and she doesn't shed a tear. But never mind, the movie needs a final sugar lump to end with so she's forgotten him for the vague promise of another go in the sack with Brad Pitt!
And I don't think I want to know what Spike Lee made of the only more-than-two-line part doled out to a black actor, a real 'Magic N****r' if ever there was one. Only she, a dying old lady "from de Carribiyan" (thus even more "primitive" than her New York urbanised daughter) can see Death for who he is, "Obeah mon. I gonna die," she says when he sees him for the first time. "No obeah, sister." replies Pitt doing an Ali G. "No duppy, no jumbie. Evera ting gon' be irey."
No it isn't. I got type two diabetes from watching this film.
Death here is played as a wide-eyed innocent abroad by Brad Pitt who manfully layers on autistic ticks and mannerisms over a wildly variable script. His character is unable (at selective 'comic' moments) to understand common idioms while, at other times, is capable of layering on the profundity and metaphor with a trowel. At one point - after being told that another character was talking through his hat says "No, he's talking through his lips!" Ho ho ho.
Claire Forlani plays the woman with whom he falls in love, and plays her with a subdued gaucheness so that in every scene she spends so much time twitching her lips (in a manner henceforth known as 'Zellwegering') and looking out of the corners of her eyes, that she looks like she's about to have a fit. The innumerable 'almost' love scenes between her and the Death character are an agony: endless alternating over-the-shoulder close ups of her twitching her eyes at everything but him, and him Aspergering his gaze at everything else in the room but her. Whole hours of this stuff go by without them looking at each other once - and then they have sex which is more of the same with fewer clothes and less dialogue.
In the end (the interminable endless end) the media mogul happily walks off with Death, after everyone has wrung every phony ounce of syrupy sentiment out of every single frame. (I nearly went into a sugar coma when Daddy and daughter had a final dance with to that saccharine hymn to trash sentimentality "What a Wonderful World") And then! (Incoming bullshit overload!) Death isn't Death anymore! He's the guy the daughter fell in love with in the first act brought back from some ill-defined afterlife by a stroke of the writer's pen. The daughter says, "I wish you could have known my dad," and off they walk to the accompaniment of glorious fireworks. All a bit sudden (well it would be if it wasn't all done so ponderously slowly) considering she hasn't even seen that her dad is dead, or, if she just somehow 'knew' it, she bothered to grieve even for a second. The poor bugger isn't even cold yet! and she doesn't shed a tear. But never mind, the movie needs a final sugar lump to end with so she's forgotten him for the vague promise of another go in the sack with Brad Pitt!
And I don't think I want to know what Spike Lee made of the only more-than-two-line part doled out to a black actor, a real 'Magic N****r' if ever there was one. Only she, a dying old lady "from de Carribiyan" (thus even more "primitive" than her New York urbanised daughter) can see Death for who he is, "Obeah mon. I gonna die," she says when he sees him for the first time. "No obeah, sister." replies Pitt doing an Ali G. "No duppy, no jumbie. Evera ting gon' be irey."
No it isn't. I got type two diabetes from watching this film.