Death Takes a Meeting

By BRUCE HANDY

Death in the movies is usually swift and merciful. A gun goes off, and someone's brains are splattered Pollock-like across a wall. Or a blue steel blade flashes in the night, and someone is left crumpled on the carpet, surrounded by a spreading crimson stain. Or an asteroid strikes Earth, and hundreds of colorful New Yorkers are crushed by the Chrysler Building. Sigh. We should all die so crisply and photogenically.

We don't, of course. Death is often messy and interminable--which is also a pretty good description of Meet Joe Black, in which Death with a big D takes over the body of Brad Pitt so that he can have beautifully lit sex with Anthony Hopkins' soulful daughter (Claire Forlani). The film, released last week, is similar in theme to last spring's modest hit City of Angels, in which Nicolas Cage, playing an angel who escorts people to heaven, decides to become mortal himself so that he can have beautifully lit sex with heart surgeon Meg Ryan--and you have to admire the daring of a movie in which Meg Ryan playing a heart surgeon is not its most farfetched element. But both films pale in audacity next to What Dreams May Come, released last month to fair box-office returns and featuring Robin Williams as a doctor who dies and goes to heaven and then journeys to hell to rescue his wife. And yes, that makes a trend: unintentionally goofy metaphysical romances about death are the volcano movies of 1998.

This was probably bound to happen now that the baby-boom generation running Hollywood has begun to turn the corner on 50 (in test screenings, Meet Joe Black is reported to have played particularly well to older men). The earnest side of my brain--the part that thinks Al Gore will make a darn fine President--even feels that these films should be applauded for trying to treat death as something sacred without asking us to watch some Oscar-trolling star die of a brain tumor. But if you're going to treat death as something more than an excuse for a kinesthetic jolt, if you're going to go ahead and push these kinds of audience buttons and make people cry (me anyway), it would be nice if you had something to say beyond "Wow."

Not that you would expect rigorous theology to be any movie's strong suit. "Where's God in all this?" Williams asks a fellow heavenite played by Cuba Gooding Jr., who replies, "He's up there somewhere, shouting down that he loves us." Not only is this dialogue unplayable (kudos to Gooding for not even sniggering); it makes God sound slovenly, like a bosomy mama hanging out a tenement window in an old Italian movie. The denizens of hell, meanwhile, appear to be damned for their lack of self-esteem--a quintessentially '90s view of sin. Forgive yourself, and cue beautiful music.

The other films are even fizzier on matters relating to eternity. Meet Joe Black offers a curt description of the afterlife as "the next place," while City of Angels explains it as "living--just not the way you think." This reminded me of a sad dream I once had, one that has stayed with me a long time, in which my dead father appeared at the foot of my bed and I asked him to pass on the wisdom of the universe. He thought about it for a moment and then offered, "You win some, you lose some." Hey, maybe my subconscious could make a million dollars a screenplay!

The real message of each of these films is that love is what makes life worth living--which is pretty much the message of every American movie that isn't about staying true to your dreams. For some religious groups, which have often complained that Hollywood ignores spiritual themes, this easygoing faith is a mixed blessing. "The idea that people are interested in spiritual things, that there's this longing for something beyond ourselves, is positive. But we have a problem with theological error," explains Bob Smithouser, who writes movie reviews for Plugged In, a publication of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. His critique of What Dreams May Come complained that the movie's New Age conceits "fly in the face of biblical truth." As if Hollywood was ever faithful to a book.

It's a good thing Smithouser hasn't seen Jack Frost yet. In this film, to be released next month, neglectful father Michael Keaton dies and comes back as a snowman so he can spend some quality time with his son. Surely this too flies in the face of biblical truth--not to mention the song Frosty the Snowman. I just hope Jack will have something more interesting to say than my old man. But I doubt it.