Joe didn't specificly reveal the truth to her, and I don't know any human being who could have just understood from that last brief conversation that they had, that the man they loved was actually death. Susan made the drastic (and correct) conclusion that Joe was someone else, and not the guy from the coffee shop. How did she figure this out? And more importantly, how did she know her father was going to die?
shareI think, in that moment Joe let her have a 'glimpse' be it a feeling, intuition or something metaphysical of who he was and what his purpose was. It was similar to the old Jamaican lady who was also granted or could sense beyond his physical form.
shareExactly what confused me
NCIyeS
When he asks her to tell him who he really is, he is testing her resolve to see if she is really willing to come with him. I believe at that time, Susan fully knows who exactly he is, and she's so scared she refuses to face the truth. He sees that and realises she 's not ready, and promises to give her back the guy from the coffee shop. Also, John Parish said his goodbyes to his daughter, so when she sees them heading to the other side of the bridge, she knows he's going to die.
It must have been frieghtening for her to make all those connections even if until the end she doesnt quite accept/understand it. It's only when the real joe mentions the coffee shop at the ends that she dots the "i"'s and goes "I wish you could have known my father".
Incidentally, it wasnt until you mention this little fact that I dotted the i's myself. I had never realised that she does figure out the truth after 7 or 8 watching sessions. But now following the dialogue line by line, it is implicitely clear that yea, she has an inkling as to what exactly happened, and fully accepts it now.
You have summed it up perfectly. I was never confused by the ending and I agree that's exactly what the film is portraying.
The nice thing is that Claire can have her life with the coffee shop guy, and when she dies she can be with Death.
Time of your life, huh, kid?
The nice thing is that Claire can have her life with the coffee shop guy, and when she dies she can be with Death.
I agree with Val-El except that Susan was not scared of death but confused.
shareReally? And that's a happy ending? "Thanks honey, we had a nice life and all while we were on earth, but I'm with Death now. You go off and spend eternity by yourself."
I don't see it that way. I think Death realized that love like human's have for each other isn't something that he can really have. And Susan, after spending her life with the guy from the coffee shop, and growing old with him, will be a different person by then. Her love for Death will be a distant, albeit golden, memory by that point, but she'll have moved on, and her desire then will be to remain with the husband she loved and grew old with (assuming of course that they do stay together).
It was a bittersweet ending. Joe did send back the guy from the coffee shop so Susan could be happy. Joe was indeed feeling love for Susan and that's why he pondered staying with her, but the lady from the Caribbean brought him back to reality.
shareThe nice thing is that Claire can have her life with the coffee shop guy, and when she dies she can be with Death.
Finally!!!Thank you for putting that out there.
shareA wonderful summary of what goes through Susan's consciousness. It is exactly how I feel about and understand this movie and I've expressed this view in these boards quite some time ago but the thread has since been scraped by IMDB. Albeit you've put it here much more eloquently than I did at the time and I'm happy that this interpretation still persists and is shared by others. Wonderfully put together.
shareVery good observation about the ‘test’, I never really understood it consciously although I intuited something like that was unfolding.
shareShe didn't figure it completely out until she was talking to the coffee shop guy again. He made a comment like "after you turned the corner I never thought I'd see you again" alluding to the scene at the beginning of the movie just after they met. He has no recollection that he (well Death in his body) and Susan have fallen in love and been spending so much time together. Couple that with Joe's cryptic goodbye near the end, she made an intuitive leap.
shareI think that Death is able to give people some inkling of the truth when he does that direct look into them. He does it with Bill early in the movie and then does it again with Susan. The fact that Death let Bill see him as who he really is, becomes a foreshadowing of Death letting Susan understand it.
She knows who she has fallen in love with and when the coffee shop Joe comes back down the hill, she knows it isn't Death. She realizes that she's left with the coffee shop guy, who she did connect with originally, but also realizes that she's lost death.
She makes a choice to let go of Death and live her life, possibly with coffee-shop guy. It's all in just a few looks and thoughts all there on the screen, with no words really spoken about it at all but the few noted in this thread.
SPOT ON! Great acting by Claire Forlani.
If you want to view paradise-open up your eyes and view it!
Great catch, I was confused also and re-watched the scene of her saying goodbye a the end on my DVR with Subtitles turned on to see exactly what he said, but he never said anything revealing in dialog at least. I felt the same way that she somehow got it, but would have liked it to be a bit more obvious. What would have been nice is if the guy in the coffee shop actually was named Bill or something (I still can't believe she never got his name), then at the end after he came back, he could have said, I am Bill, to make it very clear to the audience that she knows.
shareThe ONLY way this makes sense is if Joe Black is able to let Susan get a glimpse of himself as Death. That has to be what has happened because virtually NO ONE would make that leap, that Joe is Death.
That is so stupid.
So Death must be a spirit who can do the impossible.
I loved it when Joe came back and was sort of clueless. I assumed that much of what went on he didn't know about, but some of it was a combinatiion of the two Joe's personalities.
Otherwise this movie makes little sense.
" ....but some of it was a combinatiion of the two Joe's personalities. ".
I agree with this, I think so because when Susan asks the boy :" What do we do now ?", he answers " It will come to us ": this is the reply Susan gave to Joe´s question "What do we do now?" after making love, so I really think that, in a way, Death still is in the mind and body of the boy, and the boy consequently remembers.
I really love this film, every time I watch it I feel something special related to life, love between father and daughter, or between a man and a woman .There are great lines in the film.
They did say it. She said she got a chill when asked who he is, and things other people have mentioned.
I think a lot of people missed many of the nuances in the film, based on what I'm reading here. Part of what made it less appealing than it should've been.
She didn't figure it out until he returned alone without her father and he spoke on the day they met at the coffee shop. You could see the look she gave after that and her conversation changed as well.
Insert something profound here...and try not to fight about it..
To SilverandWhite's point.. Coffee Shop Guy DID die..
and if he died.. hasn't he become part of death like everything does that dies..
[deleted]
I think Susan's realization came in two phases -- emotional and intellectual.
I think in the scene at the party near the end, when Joe tries to tell her who he is without words, that she knows. You can see her literally shaking with fear (Claire Forlani I thought did a great job with a pretty difficult part) and she tells him she's afraid. She looks terrified. Then she says, "You're... Joe. you're Joe," as if to calm herself (that everything else doesn't matter).
Joe meanwhile is upset by her fear and quiets her and says she will always have what she had in the coffee shop.
I think in that moment she absolutely knew who and what he was but couldn't face it.
Then later as she pursues Joe and her father and meets back up with "Coffee shop Joe," you see her put all the pieces together intellectually. She would not have done so without the understanding of what Joe really was from the earlier scene.
The interesting thing to me is that she falls head over heels for this sweet perfect coffee shop guy, who in a 7 minute or so scene gives her the spark she had been missing til then, yet her love for Joe seems even deeper and richer, so that it's like she has lost something in the end when she ends up with Coffee Guy (as sweet and cool as he is).
But as others have mentioned, it's entirely possible that she will have a happy life with Coffee Guy, then be reunited with and recognize Death as her other love at the end of her life. There's a poetry to that idea.
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I keep thinking I'm a grownup, but I'm not.
Susan, when falling in love with Joe, began to understand and know the finality of life, in other words knowing death, then and only then could she understand what her father meant earlier in the chopper ride about "to make this journey and not fall deeply in love well you haven't lived a life at all. But you have to try because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived..."
So only by knowing and understanding death (falling in love with Joe), was she able to comprehend what her father meant about love and living life...
She found a great appreciation for life by understanding death.
Complications with Bill's body and Susan's thought process aside, what is the coffee shop guy going to tell the family who all know him as Joe Black. Hello Allison, I'm not Joe anymore and your father is also dead across that bridge. Would've been better to end it after they crossed the bridge.
shareI actually agree with this -- the end of the movie should have been the two men walking over the bridge, and Claire Forlani seeing them and understanding.
Having Coffeeshop Joe come back and probably have to explain to the family why he's actually Bill Smith or something is going to be ridiculous, and we the audience are left thinking that too.
Also, she looked positively disappointed! He's such a goof. Even though that's something she liked in the coffeeshop, it wasn't what she fell in love with with Death Joe, who had a completely different personality, full of gravitas.
She's not going to be into Coffeeshop Joe now after all that.