The connective tissue between the romantic comedies of the 1980s and 1990s, John Patrick Shanley’s severely underrated daffy rom-com Joe Versus the Volcano celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary on March 9th, and is as watchable and moving today as it was when it was first released, to tepid reviews, in 1990.
Zany comedy from an acclaimed screenwriter
Shanley, an Off-Broadway playwright who made his breakthrough with the brilliant screenplay for Moonstruck, in 1987, is capable of works of extraordinary seriousness, like his 2005 Catholic sexual-abuse play Doubt: A Parable (also a 2008 film with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, written and directed by Shanley). But Joe, his directorial debut, is as off-the-wall as they come, with a comic language uniquely its own.
The title character (Tom Hanks) is a hypochondriacal catalogue distributor for a medical supply factory, American Panascope (“Home of the Rectal Probe”), who is convinced by a quack doctor that he’s terminally ill. Samuel Harvey Graynamore (Lloyd Bridges, father of Jeff), an eccentric billionaire, hires the hopeless Joe to jump into a volcano in the South Pacific to secure a lucrative minerals deal with the local tribe, reasoning that Joe has precious little time left, anyway. Joe takes the offer, and is escorted on his picaresque journey to the island of Waponi Woo by Graynamore’s two daughters (both played by Meg Ryan, in her first screen pairing with Hanks).
Symbols at work
A plot that borders on the irritatingly zany, at least in the abstract – but we’re in the hands of Shanley, a filmmaker whose grasp of the reoccurring visual symbol is vastly underrated. The shape of crooked pathway that leads to the hell-mouth of American Panascope, a jarring scar of a polygon, is repeated over and over again in the film, first as Panascope’s logo, then the road to the mouth of the volcano, then as a lightning bolt. As Hanks’s Joe stumbles into his miserable factory job at Panascope, we see his hands raised in the air, supplicating, desolate; then, later, adrift at sea, raised again in the same fashion, but celebratory, in a paean to the glory of existence: “Dear God, whose name I do not know: Thank you for my life. I forgot… How big. Thank you. Thank you for my life.” (Hanks, at this time exclusively a comic performer, delivers a triumphant turn as an avatar of the downtrodden who learns to default to joy in the face of hopelessness.)
Shanley’s message seems to be that we should look at the world for patterns and symbols the same way we look at a movie, the better to understand life as an interconnected story in which we are all vital characters; his dialogue exhorts us to “awake,” to “live in a state of constant amazement.”
Meg Ryan in three roles
Ryan, who would go on to star alongside Hanks in Norah Ephron’s ‘90s rom-coms Sleepless in Seattle (1992) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), plays three roles – DeDe, one of Joe’s co-workers at Panascope, and Graynamore’s two wayward daughters, Angelica and Patricia. Ryan’s work here is far and away the best of her career. In a succession of ridiculous wigs (“The first time I saw you,” one of her characters drawls, “I felt like I’d met you before”), she gives three indelible performances in one. Joe goes for DeDe out of lust, comes to sympathize with Angelica, and finally falls almost instantly head over heels in love with Patricia, in a move that comments ironically on the movie tropes that justify such contrivances. (“I’ve fallen in love with you,” she tells Joe; “I don’t know how it happened! And I’ve never even slept with you or anything.”)
The brilliance of the triple role is that Joe falls in love simultaneously with one woman and with three, subdividing the traditional Shakespearean marriage plot into rising action (DeDe), building intimacy (Angelica), and climax (Patricia), all as fluidly as could be hoped. Again with the repeated images – Hanks’s hand grasps Ryan’s in the same desperate, human motion in two of the three storylines, driving home the fact that despite the wigs, the audience is meant to fully understand that these three idiosyncratic characters are facets of a single woman.
Broad farce from a killer supporting cast
What Shanley allows his rom-com scripts to do that Ephron, divinely talented as she was, never broached was to venture into the broad, the melodramatic, and the cartoonish. (No wonder Nic Cage, in Moonstruck, fits in so well in his world: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride!”) Thus we get outrageous performances not only from the rubber-faced Bridges but from Abe Vigoda, Amanda Plummer, Nathan Lane, and Carol Kane, all character actors perfectly suited to Shanley’s brand of silly, as well as a gorgeous and self-contained little turn from Ossie Davis as Marshall, a limo driver hired by Graynamore for Joe’s use who briefly teaches him to appreciate the finer things in life.
The human touch that lasts
Shanley, like Joe, worked for a medical equipment factory in his younger years; like Joe, he was unlucky in love, divorcing young before meeting his second wife, to whom he’s still married today. Perhaps that accounts for the fact that despite its more fanciful touches, there is something soulful and tangible about Joe Versus the Volcano that stays with you. Its reception in 1990 was brutal (Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, compared it to Howard the Duck), and after its released Shanley was unable to secure another directing job for 18 years (until Doubt, which was nominated for five Academy Awards). But audiences have come to understand Joe and to love in the 35 years since its release, and it’s easy to see why. In every frame of this movie, which is very nearly perfect, there is something to adore, something to remember forever, something to remind you of the essential goodness of the irreducible human spirit.
Joe Versus the Volcano is streaming on Tubi.
