What the hell happens at the end of 'Meet Joe Black?'

This post contains spoilers for the 1998 film Meet Joe Black, which, as just noted, came out 26 years ago. If you want to avoid spoilers for a nearly three-decades-old 181-minute remake of a 1934 film based on a 1924 play, go ahead and wait for the second edition this week. My apologies to everyone except Anthony Hopkins.

Let’s go ahead and get something out of the way right up top: there will never be a movie moment that ever approximates the crosswalk scene in Meet Joe Black. This three-hour film is so deliberately paced (to the point of exhaustion, in the back half) that the meet-cute with Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani’s characters in the diner unfolds essentially in real time, and their lingering over parting is so drawn out that it’s almost like being inside a sound bath. They walk away, and the walking away of it all takes up over a minute of screen time, both missing one another turning back and the tone is nothing but romance and regret and what ifs.

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And then Brad Pitt crosses against the light, and an indispensable moment in cinema occurs.

If you have never seen this scene before, I beg you to just go watch the entire movie. It’s worth it.

The first time I saw this movie, in 1998, I absolutely lost my goddamned mind. It is truly unlike anything else in any other movie before or since. And it can never, ever be replicated. That this scene happens in this movie not only validates its entire existence (despite that it isn’t a very good movie), but almost makes it a cornerstone of cinema.

Although … you know, there is one other thing in the movie that transcends the medium and becomes objective art.

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about what you already know about Meet Joe Black. I’m here to ask what in the absolute hell happens at the end of it.

Meet Joe Black, based on Death Takes a Holiday, is about — and you’ll never believe this — Death taking a holiday. Death — like, the grim reaper; the deity responsible for transitioning humans from alive to not — comes to billionaire Anthony Hopkins and explains that Anthony Hopkins is scheduled to die very soon, but in exchange for like a week more of time with his family as an alive concern, he wants to be shown around and treated to a glimpse of what life is like as a human. The thing that makes the most sense about all of this is that he asks a billionaire communications mogul to show him around. Those guys probably know how to live pretty well. Death takes the form (in its words, “the body”) of a dude who Anthony Hopkins’ daughter, Claire Forlani, just met at a diner. Wonder what happened to that guy?

Yadda yadda yadda, Death eats peanut butter, speaks pidgin, is totally spacey and it’s minimally explained away that a portion of his consciousness is constantly focused on making people die, and then Death bones down with Claire Forlani. The whole thing culminates in Anthony Hopins’ 65th birthday Gatsby-level bash, at which he executes a reverse hostile takeover with Death’s help and then comes to an agreement to die afterward.

In two separate over-five-minute conversations between Brad Pitt and Claire Forlani, Death explains that he has to go away forever, but absolutely does not explain that he is actually Death. And he sorta alludes that he’s gonna have to go kill her dad after his big birthday speech, but when she runs to the rear of the yard at the end of the party (while the finale rack of fireworks is going off), she sees Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins walking over a bridge (that I guess leads to the top of a hill(?) on their property(?)) and disappearing into the night and I guess it all sort of half-clicks into place for her. You know; that her dad is leaving with Death, because he’s gonna die now. And that she banged Death.

But then Brad Pitt returns by himself, not acting like Death, and instead acting like the guy she met at the diner, but that guy who has short-term memory loss and is either moderately concussed or mildly brain damaged, on account of he’s been dead for a week. And as she talks to him, then it REALLY clicks home for her: this isn’t the guy she spent the past week falling in love with, because that guy is Death. And I guess we’re supposed to be happy for these crazy kids now because these two attractive people now don’t have to deal with one of them being a spectral force of entropy in the universe.

Anyway, Brad Pitt comes back over the bridge alone, and he seems confused about why he’s there and it’s extremely unclear whether he knows that his body just spent the week getting to know Claire Forlani, including carnally. That part of the equation is confusing and unsettling enough, but what I really need to know is: what in the Christ happened to Anthony Hopkins’ body? Is it just out of sight over the rise of the bridge, and everyone is perfectly content to let it decompose up there until morning? Because Pitt and Forlani have a third five-minute conversation, and neither seem particularly concerned about him having disappeared and then Brad Pitt schizophrenically reappearing alone.

The rest of the movie doesn’t involve magical realism outside of Death’ existence/inhabiting of a body. It shows death, but at no time does it imply that in this reality, a dead person’s physical form disappears/transcends the mortal plane. Quite the opposite, in fact: the central conceit of the movie involves Death needing to take the corpse of a human in order to get his vacation. So there’s absolutely the corpse of Anthony Hopkins out there somewhere in the backyard, and while Forlani 100 percent understands her dad has just died, she one thousand percent does not give a shit, as she’s sort of locked in on her not-really boyfriend blinking through a traumatic injury while they stand beneath a million fireworks. (Seriously, the fireworks budget on this film had to have been insane, because they filmed reverse shots and coverage of these interminable conversations with fireworks overhead.)

I need the version of this movie where Forlani runs away screaming and Brad Pitt’s human character is hauled away in cuffs because he was the last person seen with her father and had just spent a week around her family using an alias and then impersonating an IRS agent. When her father’s rictus visage is discovered on the hillside, they can only conclude that Pitt is the nefarious Billionare Butcher, a serial killer who I guess was let out of prison this year and finally tracked down poor Jimmy Buffett.

By the way, this movie was Martin Brest’s follow-up to Scent of a Woman. Universal Pictures gave him $90 million to make a 181-minute movie that features Brad Pitt’s all-time worst dye job, but his all-time best Jamaican accent. This movie in no way had to be that long, by the way. It was egregious at the time, but when you watch it now, pretty much in real time you’ll find yourself aggressively noticing which scenes can go and what can be trimmed. You’ll also find yourself with a ton of free time to wonder about what happened to Claire Forlani’s career. Five years after MJB, she was co-starring in Jackie Chan’s like 19th-most successful English language film, and ten years after MJB she was sixth billed in a Toby Keith movie that clocks in at a breathtaking 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Someone please tell me what happened to Anthony Hopkins’ corpse. Stop me before I have to get Universal Pictures to give me $90 million to make a 235-minute movie about Hopkins lying dead on that hill while his daughter necks with a coma patient.

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