“You will be my tour guide,” he tells an understandably stunned Hopkins, and before long Death, under the moniker of Joe Black, is attending Parrish Communications board meetings, wrapping his tongue around gob after gob of peanut butter (a delicacy, we are led to believe, absent from the netherworld), and falling in love with daughter Susan. He's here to take the senior Parrish off to the great beyond, but before he does, he'd like to find out a bit about the living. As luck, or fate, or, more accurately Death should have it, the stranger is reborn, after a fashion, as Death itself appears at the Parrish family mansion wearing the stranger's flesh. As it happens, the handsome stranger is struck by a car and killed moments later. During the course of a five-minute flirtation the spark arcs, and the two near-strangers part, never to meet again.
daughter of Hopkins' wealthy media magnate William Parrish - runs into a nameless but utterly charming young man (Pitt) in a New York coffee shop. Brest (Scent of a Woman) opens the film with a sequence in which Susan Parrish (Forlani) - young, M.D. With Hopkins onscreen for much of it, it's not as dreary as you'd expect, and even the angelic Pitt, as an anthropomorphized, blonde-banged Death, is surprisingly tolerable in an admittedly difficult role that could have just as easily descended into unwitting farce. A loose retelling of 1934's Death Takes a Holiday, this updated version adapts a fuller, firmer attitude toward other-worldly romance as well as a near-three-hour running time.