Joe versus the Volcano Joe versus the Volcano Warner Home Video 1990 / Color / 2:35 enhanced widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date June 3, 2002 / 14.98 Starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Abe Vigoda, Dan Hedaya, Barry McGovern, Amanda Plummer, Ossie Davis Cinematography Stephen Goldblatt Production Designer Bo Welch Film Editors Richard Halsey, Kenneth Wannberg Original Music Georges Delerue Produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Steven Spielberg and Teri Schwartz Written and Directed by John Patrick Shanley
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Pleasant Reader Responses!!! Here's a wonderful comedy that needs to be re-evaluated by as many people who can muster the imagination to give it another try, as it's the romantic equal of I Know Where I'm Going, and goes neck and neck with Groundhog Day in the Useful Philosophy department. For some mysterious reason, Joe versus the Volcano was critically trounced and rejected by audiences back in 1990 - Savant's even read a 'hip' treatise on the movie industry for that year, where the author made it an example of idiotic and worthless moviemaking. This reviewer has no response to that. If the rest of this piece gets a bit enthusiastic, let's just say this is one of Savant's favorite films. I've yet to show it to anyone who didn't warm up to it mightily, and as I have friends and family who delight in consistently rolling their eyes at my taste in pictures, that's a strong endorsement. Synopsis (spoilers): Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) works at a demoralizing drudge job in a medical-supply firm under the petty tyranny of boss Frank Waturi (Dan Hedaya). After losing his nerve while a fireman, he's become a chronically congested and miserable hypochondriac. A visit to mysterious Dr. Ellison (Robert Stack) confirms Joe's worst nightmares - he's dying from a terminal disease. Awareness of his imminent death brings Joe back to life, so to speak. He quits his job and impulsively dates DeDe (Meg Ryan), a fear-constipated co-worker. In the morning, eccentric millionaire industrialist Samuel Harvey Graynamore (Lloyd Bridges) shows up at Joe's door with a wild offer. Graynamore needs an essential resource controlled by the Waponis, a weird tribe on an island in the South Pacific. They won't cooperate unless Graynamore provides them with a sacrifice to appease their volcano god. That's where Joe comes in - he's given a sheaf of credit cards to fund a spending spree on his way to certain doom ... he's going to die anyway, so why not a short, lavish, glorious life instead of a slow painful demise? Joe's crooked road to doom. John Patrick Shanley is a popular playwright whose scripts for Five Corners and Moonstruck earned him high praise and the opportunity to make this film and the disappointing The January Man. Both were perceived as dismal flops, but Joe versus the Volcano has accumulated an impressive cult (sorry, no other word applies) following. Its website was one of the first big movie fan sites, and has been on the Savant Links page since the beginning of this column. It's not just the usual pap, and has a number of compelling essays analyzing the film. Joe versus the Volcano is extremely worthy of analysis. It's heavily stylized and composed of only a few scenes. Nothing remotely realistic happens and the picture dotes on a mannered artificiality that apparently communicated nothing to the 'hip' audiences of 1990. The opening, with the giant doors of the American Panascope Company ("Home of the Rectal Probe") admitting a legion of workaday zombies, evokes Metropolis. The show starts in this expressionistic mode, with Joe's coworkers reduced to soulless Pods in a greenish half-world of bad fluorescent lighting. With the logic of a fairy tale, Joe moves to other styles, staying off-balance all the while. Most scenes are accompanied by brilliantly chosen pop music - Ray Charles, Brasil '66, My Fair Lady, all united only by a refreshing refusal to be ordinary. Nothing we see is 'credible' yet it all makes story sense: the recurring motif of the jagged lightning bolt; the palmy island-with-a-volcano first seen on a novelty lamp; and an exaggerated giant Blue Moon (shared with Moonstruck) representing the power of Nature, which to Shanley equals God. And then there's the Duck.  3 From its cheapo font main titles, Joe versus the Volcano is visually deceiving. Shanley sets up brilliantly composed scene shots that express just the right mood, and moves on. Coverage is for wimps. The slow zoom back outside Dr. Ellison's office to reveal the tableau of Joe hugging a passerby's giant-sized dog, is wonderful. New York as seen from the Staten Island Ferry is a fantasy wall of colored lights, and the glowing sunsets from the deck of the sailboat are equally artificial. When Joe dances to music from a transistor radio while adrift on the ocean, the screen is just an expanse of sky with this goofy, ukulele-playing guy doing The Swim for his own amusement. There's a wonderful on-the-town sequence in New York that ranks among the best (especially this year). In one magical moment a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty, totally blue, steps into a shot. LA, by contrast, is reduced to an airport, Palos Verdes ("It looks fake!"), a chi-chi restaurant, Mulholland Drive, and Santa Monica Beach. There's sharply observed criticism in all of this, softened by the fairy-tale approach. Perhaps 1990 audiences thought it all irrelevant for a Tom Hanks movie, and expected him to solve his problems by kissing a mermaid or running down a hall in his underwear. Instead we get little glimpses of distorted reality like the diminished-perspective Coffee-Corner-Of-Doom, with the powdered creamer that clots instead of dissolving. This ought to have communicated something to dehumanized working folks. Maybe they just felt insulted. The characters Joe encounters are also wonderful. They're all given excellent, unrealistic dialogue. Dan Hedeya, looking exactly like the farmer in the first animated Animal Farm, is an object lesson of what happens to defeated paper pushers. Mr. Graynamore, all bluff and show, pitches his insane offer with the perfect assurance of business hustlers who use their persuasive talent to entrap people. Abe Vigoda is the native chief who seems to realize that he's an expendable plot mechanism. A deadpan, "I'll be going now", is his perfunctory exit line. But Joe doesn't interact solely with users, losers and zombies. There's also the dignified good will of Marshall (Ossie Davis), a chauffeur who doubles as a mentor-motivator, helping to prepare Joe for his odyssey, so to speak. My favorite bit of all is Barry McGovern's marvelously intense luggage salesman, who outfits Joe like Argos getting Jason ready to go forth and conquer. "That's extremely interesting ... as a luggage problem" he intones, as if sagely figuring out a crucial chess move.  1 Even the bits are superb. Carol Kane has a one-shot smile as a hairdresser and Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction) purrs nicely as the first mate on the sailboat. Finally, hiding in plain sight is Nathan Lane, disguised almost beyond recognition as the Waponis' excitable 'advance man'. The romantic center is Meg Ryan, in three roles. Each woman Joe meets on his journey is a dead ringer for the last, but all have serious problems. Poor DeDe is simply terrorized by life - she responds to Joe's advances but folds up like a withered flower when confronted with the idea of terminal sickness. She's too cowed to handle much of anything outside herself, and Joe lets her go. The challenging Greynamore Sisters are seemingly meant to represent polar opposite reactions to an oppressive, wealthy parent. In a society where making it on your own is a tough row to hoe, there's a tendency to never break free from parents. Angelica, the Los Angeles Mercedes-Benz welfare case, has become the bought dog of her father, and has lost all self-respect. She's caricatured as a trend-following hollow woman, cracking crab legs and reciting pitiful poetry to snag a pitiful one-night. DeDe and Angelica fascinate Joe but neither is the girl for him. Angelica's half-sister Patricia fits the bill - she's a rebel and her only frustration is her uneasy relationship with her father. Patricia hasn't sold out like Angelica and is acutely aware that every handout comes with strings attached. She's a player and a fighter, and she's just what Joe needs. So this brings us to the island of Waponi Wu, where most viewers say they totally tuned out of the movie. I guess it was the last straw, an artificial stylistic jump they didn't want to make. To Savant, it's perfect. Joe versus the Volcano is about taking responsibility for one's own life, which means having courage - courage not to be cool, courage not to be affluent: The courage to accept oneself and face life instead of studiously avoiding possible pitfalls. Joe fancies himself a helpless victim until he's liberated by a fatal diagnosis. He makes the moves and takes the chances only when he no longer has his compass affixed to the safe path. Joe defies the feared 'crooked roads' that loom over American Panascope, Waponi Wu and his own living room, and finds his own adventure.  2 The danger is in selling out, losing one's dignity, losing one's soul. DeDe and Mr. Wa-Waturi are lost and don't even know it. Angelica is like an addict: she knows she's wasting her life yet is too weak to do anything other than abuse potential mates like Joe, whom she patronizes because she no longer has a grip on her own personality. The chip on Patricia's shoulder is different - she gives Joe a hard time, unconsciously testing to see if he's another passive Pod, or if he will fight back. Ya gotta be a fighter on the personality plane - you can't just passively accept things. The Waponis may look like over-costumed Gilligan's Island rejects, drinking huge amounts of Jump Orange Soda, but Savant thinks they're perfect too. A melding of 'Polynesian, Celtic, Hebrew and Latin' influences, they're a society that's sold out entirely. Their fear is the giant volcano Wu, which instead of being a given (it either kills you or it doesn't), has become a cultural Moloch that determines their every move. Sam Greynamore exploits the Waponis with their own fear. Because they are so demoralized that nobody will sacrifice themselves to save the rest, they have to bargain for an outsider to sacrifice himself for them. As a gambit, it's vaguely similar to The Wicker Man. The Waponis are so lost, they're worshipping Gods they no longer believe in: "Joe, even the Chief doesn't want you to jump". Refusing to swallow Waturi's belief that Life is supposed to be rotten, Joe looks for the end of his crooked road only to find both his true nature and happiness. It doesn't have to happen that way - he's indeed lucky. But even as an entire society is wiped out before his eyes, and not grieved one bit (who mourns people without souls?), Joe hasn't put it all together. He needs a romantic Other to share life with and to keep him straightened out, away from hypochondriac, Bickle-ish Morbid Self-Attention. Joe versus the Volcano is of course a Shaggy Dog story which uses its premise as a hook to keep us wondering how in the Heck it can satisfactorily resolve itself. Most Shaggy Dogs evade their own premises, or end with their issues 'meaningfully' unresolved, as in The Birds. We say that a movie like Joe versus the Volcano is 'painting itself into a corner', and like a Rod Serling twist, what happens at the windup takes on too much weight. In the final judgment, the real measure of a film is whether it connects with an audience or not, and the 1990 rejection may be evidence that Joe versus the Volcano is a failure. I find that the resolution does all the things it needs to. People remark that the volcano climax is silly and unrealistic, when the picture never for a moment tried to be realistic ... some fantasies you reject and some you embrace. Perhaps Tom Hanks in 1990 didn't send the right signals to get viewers ready to see something with this kind of 'heavy whimsy'. Go figure. Other interpretations abound. One centers on the idea that Joe versus the Volcano is a child's fairy tale inspired by Joe's juvenile lamp, the one with the 'island paradise' pattern that becomes a motif. In this Invaders from Mars-like dream logic, the movie is a stylized picture book because it's being dreamed by a reader of stylized picture books, a kid. That's why the show is constructed purely of whimsical, irrational things like 'brain clouds' - It's a dream. And the dream is full of all kinds of wisdom on how to live one's life fully. I find the philosophy in Joe versus the Volcano really useful ... for seeing the truth of things, not necessarily doing the right thing. DVD Savant isn't a life coward, but one sure tends to look back on those past decisions you were too conventional about, in a different way. 'Don't make your life decisions out of fear' would seem to be the message that coalesces from John Patrick Shanley's eccentric fable. Stop denying Death and go out and live as if you aren't going to be around forever. Outside the Home of the Rectal Probe. Warners' DVD of Joe versus the Volcano has been a long time a' coming, down its own crooked road. The reputation of this film being what it is, I'm grateful to see it come out at all. When TBS shows the picture, it's pan-scanned into meaningless two-shots. I've played my letterboxed laser disc endlessly, and now it can finally be retired. The colors are much sharper on the DVD, with the sickly greens of the flourescent lights that 'suck out your soul' pulsing like electricity. The restaurant's scarlet hues are stable, and the amusing illustration-like views of the Volcano are a lot sharper, because of DVD's ability to handle reds better. This movie cries for extras, or anything to help place it in context. A chance to learn more about John Patrick Shanley would have been welcome, but the 'cast and crew' production notes link only to more info on Hanks and Ryan, two personalities well covered in the ensuing decade. I thought their You've Got Mail was a horrible stinker, a wretched philosophical opposite to Joe versus the Volcano. The 'behind the scenes documentary' turns out to be a woebegone featurette from 1990 where the actors pay lip service to the 'existential' nature of the film, and then basically give up. Shanley smiles and answers the final question, "Who Wins, Joe or the Volcano?" with a meaningless laugh that indicates editorial desperation. A music video for the Eric Burdon version of 16 Tons that opens the film is fairly unimpressive, and the big-faces cover art stinks, "- Like the coffee! Mr. Wa-waturi!" According to what I've heard, Joe versus the Volcano's ending was refilmed after bad previews. The original script was once available online, where you could read the unused original ending, but it's since disappeared. Not so fast, other readers have additional info -  Here. Savant prefers the final, but the first, which pads out the end in unnecessarily tying up some loose plot ends, has some hilarious jokes - Patricia, rescued with Joe on the deck of the sister ship Tweedledee, to her father and Dr. Ellison: "That's the most dastardly thing I've ever heard. You're both Dastards." Now, seeing that alternate ending would have been a thrill. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Joe versus the Volcano rates: Movie: Excellent Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent Supplements: featurette, trailer, music video Packaging: Snapper case Reviewed: April 6, 2002 Footnotes: 1. It was depressing to see John Cleese as the new Q in The World is Not Enough, doing silly-ass nothing comedy business that would be too broad for Casino Royale (1967). Too bad Barry Mcgovern is American - he'd be a terrific Q. Return 2. The same conflict is humorously described in Albert Brooks' 1991 film Defending Your Life, which is more blunt about 'facing your fear!' as the key to personal advancement in a cosmic system of reincarnation. Joe versus the Volcano is closer to Brooks' picture than it is to 1993's Groundhog Day, which to Savant seems an improved, less philosophically leaky It's a Wonderful Life. Return 3. As proposed in one of the essays on the Joe versus the Volcano site, the Duck, seen in one brief but pointed shot on Waponi Wu, might represent the Devil, as the tempter Sam Graynamore's cane handle bears the image of a duck as well. The implication is that Graynamore hasn't lost his soul, he's sold it. Return Reader Response to the JOE VS THE VOLCANO review ... and pleasant it is (4/10/02): Return Note: I haven't edited these much, as my helpful readers bring up all kind of other subjects that might interest you as well. Glenn, Let me know if this is the original script you're looking for. I found it cached on Google. Joe Script URL #1 Maybe I'll try to see the DVD. When I saw the movie on video a few years back, I recall its being very, very bad. Or anyway extremely mediocre. But you are so effusive about it -- I might give it another shot. Chris. *** Hello Glenn, it's Mark! I read your review and, although I've never seen it, I've heard a lot about it (good and bad) and the fact that it's out on disc plus your in-depth description of its fantasy elements means that I'll be adding this disc to my collection real soon. By the way, I watched The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb over the weekend. Very beautiful films and nicely paced too! It felt like I was watching an old novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs come to life! Do you know of any other films of that type that are out on disc that you can recommend to me? I'm always on the lookout for a good film that has slipped through the cracks! FYI: I read on the --- website that Twenty Million Miles To Earth will be coming from Columbia in about two to three months from now. *** Hi, Glenn: Enjoyed your take on Joe versus the Volcano--it's one of my favorites, too. I saw it on its original release with my parents, and I recall the three of us being the only ones laughing in the theater. I remember thinking: Uh-oh--this movie's in trouble. Then again, I remember us being almost the only people inthe theater laughing at Annie Hall, too, and that ended up successful. Perhaps suburban Long Island is just a special case. I'm curious how the DVD release will do. Judging by feedback on Amazon, there's a sizable community that LOVES the movie as much as you and I do. Let's keep our fingers crossed. By the way, the early script is still available online, but it's not at the URL where it used to be. You can find it here: Script 2 URL I much prefer the final ending. The early-script ending just seems wrong,somehow. I'd swear that when this DVD was originally announced, there was going to be a John Patrick Shanley commentary. Did I dream that (I'd sure love to hear one!) or did it fall through, I wonder. Best, Jim Donahue *** Dear Mr. Erickson, Thank you for your insightful writing regarding the under-appreciated Joe versus the Volcano. I was beginning to think I was alone in admiring this gem. I originally saw it theatrically when it was released. My friend and I both loved it and completely understood John Patrick Shanley's intent and symbolism. We have since converted a few people who also shared our opinions once they viewed this fine piece of crafting. I wanted to let you know that although Greg Brush's script site is down, I was able to find what appears to be the same first draft version at another site: Script 2 URL I didn't see the full screenplay of the one you mentioned for comparison. Using Google's cache feature, I also found some of the text of the old GeoCities site. It does appear incomplete, though, ending in the midst of scene 42. However, I am not sure of the copyright issues, so I don't recommend downloading anything. It can be viewed at: Joe Script URL #1 I just wanted to point the sites out to you and again thank you for writing about this neglected film. I enjoy your columns on DVD Talk. Keep up the good work. A fellow "Joe vs" fan, David Roberts "Mr. Gore" *** I remember being so psyched when the movie came out. I watched it and hated it; severe disappointment.  I guess at 15 it just didn't make much sense to me.  Anyway, about 5 years later in college, I found myself thinking about it.  I couldn't pin down why I didn't like the movie, and that bothered me.  So I rented it and I would now rate it as one of the top 10 movies of all time.  That's my story, anyway.  I know you were curious. Also, I thought I'd let you know I was able to find the original script you mentioned using google.   Here is the link: Script 2 URL - Jeremy Craig *** Just wanted to drop you a note about Joe versus the Volcano. Thanks for the great, insightful review. It's about time somebody stood up and shouted about this movie. I'm sick to death of the peons who rate movies based on their revenues. This movie really struck a chord with me, and a lot of my friends. The only people who could say anything bad about it are obviously corporate drones who are happy with being drones. Death to the drones!!! Robert. Hi Glenn, How are ya? Bill here from Film Freak Central. Not in the habit of e-mailing critics to say "a job well done," but I've looked forward to reading your fleshed-out thoughts on Joe versus the Volcano since you first wrote about the film over at DVD Resource, and you didn't disappoint. Thank goodness this movie's finally on disc, even if it is a weak effort from Warner. (I'd've sacrificed the 5.1 remix for some truly meaningful supplements.) Anyway, praise for that piece. Superfluous, to be sure, but thanks for a little bit of pleasure. Bill Savant's flattered by the attention and all the helpful links to web JOE scripts. Thanks for the Emails! GE [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © MH Sub I, LLC dba Internet Brands. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use