Meet Joe Black (1998) is one of those movies that gets easily overlooked. When you think back on Brad Pitt’s career, you might think of Fight Club (1999), Interview with the Vampire (1994), or the Oceans movies. Do you ever think of the one where he played Death incarnate and fell in love with the daughter of the man whose life he was about to take? 

Maybe you should. Meet Joe Black is a solid movie, even if it received mixed reviews when it first came out.

Bill Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) is approaching his 65th birthday and contemplating merging his large media company with another upon retirement. He has a special relationship with his daughter Susan (Claire Forlani), who is engaged to one of his board members, Drew (Jake Weber). Parrish picks up on the fact that Susan is not completely head-over-heels in love with Drew, and he tells her she should wait to marry someone who “you can love like crazy, and who will love you the same way back.” Shortly after their conversation, Susan meets a handsome and charismatic young man (Brad Pitt) at a coffee shop, and their connection is instant. Shockingly, however, that young man is killed upon exiting the coffee shop.

Soon, Parrish receives a visit from that handsome young man, but he’s not the man from the coffee shop. He’s Death, in the body of that young man. He informs Parrish that he is there to take his life. However, Death was so impressed with Parrish’s wise advice to his daughter, as well as his lifetime of accomplishments, that he wanted to experience life beside him for a while before doing so. Thus begins the journey of Death, “Joe Black,” awkwardly making his way through the living world and falling in love with Susan, much to the dismay of her fiancé.  

Of course, eventually, Death has to return, and he has to bring someone with him. What if he doesn’t want to leave Susan?

I don’t need to spoil Meet Joe Black to review it, so I encourage you to check it out if it has seemed interesting to you thus far. The downsides: this movie is a whopping three hours long, and sometimes feels to be moving at a snail’s pace. It is also really quiet, so you may need to use subtitles. Black’s awkwardness as a human is a little off-putting, but as he adapts more to the world, he gets better, and his connection with Susan becomes more believable. 

From a Catholic perspective, this movie presents interesting questions. What really happens at the transition from this life to the afterlife? Are we greeted by angels, or Saints, or Jesus himself, to bring us into eternity? Do we know we are going to die right before it happens? The Church does not have definitive teachings on these matters, just that we will be individually judged before entering either heaven, purgatory, or hell. We are then judged again at the end of days, where our souls are reunited with our bodies and it is determined whether we will spend eternity in heaven or hell. We also know that death is not something to fear, as it is in death that we experience eternal life in the presence of the Lord. I appreciate that the film does a great job of depicting death as a peaceful transition. There is a scene when Joe Black is in the hospital and visits a Jamaican woman who is near her end. She recognizes him as Death and begs for him to take her now so that her suffering will be over. He speaks to her in her own language, comforting her and assuring her that her suffering will be over, and even gives her a glimpse of the peace that the afterlife will bring. He tells her “we can’t mess with the timing of these things,” which reminds us that only God is truly in control of our life and our death.

There is one sex scene in Meet Joe Black that you may want to skip over. Otherwise, there is nothing else that is particularly concerning to a Catholic viewer.