Meet Joe Black often borderlines on becoming a technical mess. The script fumbles, the direction is passive and the editing seems almost non-existent. But somehow, I find it hard to hate this film. Meet Joe Black has a sort of goofy sincerity, a feeling that the production crew’s hearts and minds were in the right place, but they have ultimately failed to package their product successfully. There are many rewarding features on show here, but every one of them is exaggerated and sensationalized until they become faintly tiresome. With a running time of almost three hours, director Martin Brest (Scent of a Woman) never knows exactly when to call it quits. During his extravagantly long creation, however, Brest hits upon some worthwhile lessons of life and love. It’s just a pity that it takes patient ears to listen to them.

Media tycoon William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) has not got long to live. In fact, Death himself has struck a bargain with Parrish: if he shows him the wonders of life, he will prolong his death until he is no longer interested in human behavior. Parrish grudgingly accepts, and introduces death (with the newly acquired body of Brad Pitt) as "Joe Black." Black experiments with simplistic human treats like peanut butter, and ponders over the meaning of the phrase "as certain as death and taxes." Before long, though, his experimentation becomes more than just skin deep. Parish’s daughter Susan (the lovely Claire Forlani) takes a shining to Black, and before long an uncertain relationship builds between them.

In my review of 1998’s The Mask of Zorro, I said that Anthony Hopkins was "one of the true masters of American cinema," and Meet Joe Black strengthens my belief. On paper, his characters might seem cliché and his scenes might seem witless, but Hopkins gives them credibility. In this case, the character of Bill Parrish could easily have appeared as cold and inaccessible. Fortunately, Hopkins gives him warmth and a heart, whilst also providing a cutting-edge authoritarian presence. Parrish is not unlike Disney’s Scrooge McDuck; they are both smart and shrewd, but have a lovable core that makes everything they do intriguing. Brad Pitt’s presence is often wooden, but he is playing an out-of-environment character so I guess it’s intentional. It is almost as if Pitt only chooses roles that have a reason to be bad – he was a vampire in Interview with the Vampire, a dopey stoner in True Romance, a nut case in Twelve Monkeys, and in Seven Years in Tibet he was…an Austrian.

Meet Joe Black is modeled in the old-fashioned style of grand cinema. The screenplay was loosely based on 1934’s Death Takes a Holiday, and the qualities of yesteryear are on show here. The film takes a lot of time – in fact, way too much time – to build a climax which, naturally, ends in an explosion of fireworks. Whilst it is often hard to accept a film with such a slow pace, it is also hard to resist it. The central romance between Pitt and Forlani is a nice bit of romantic fluff: it’s instantly forgettable but enjoyable at the time.

What is unforgivable about Meet Joe Black is that all it achieves could have been made in half the time. The three hours of footage were not made because the plot is especially complex, but rather because almost every shot is over-filmed. The dialogue is drawn out and loses much of its interest, and there are more than a few scenes that could have been axed all together. Still, amongst all this cinematic mayhem, Meet Joe Black is a film with a heart. It takes risks, and although many of them do not pay off, they are generally pleasing experiences. I could imagine that Meet Joe Black would make a good subject for a film school: how to take a potentially excellent film and exaggerate it to the point where it pushes the boundaries of acceptance.