Tim here. When Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were paired off in 1998's instantly-dated time capsule You've Got Mail, the ad campaign – and, indeed, the entire film production – hinged on the can't miss idea that everybody would be thrilled to have another chance to see the stars of Sleepless in Seattle in a romantic comedy. What nobody seemed to recall at the time was that You've Got Mail was, in fact, the third team-up for Hanks and Ryan, not the second. Their first collaboration was the underperforming fantasy comedy Joe Versus the Volcano, which opened 25 years ago today, and has spent the subsequent quarter of a century assembling a smallish cult that hasn't remotely completed the task of restoring its reputation.
As a longtime member of that cult, I find that horribly disappointing. Joe Versus the Volcano is nobody's idea of a flawless film comedy, but it has the undeniable merit of being incredibly weird. [More...]
The basic hook – a man with a terminal medical condition decides to volunteer himself as a human sacrifice, and on his trip to the volcano meets a woman who fills him with a sense of value that he's never had – is a seemingly fatal combination of the arbitrarily bleak with the distressingly trite, but what saves the film from itself is the total commitment that everyone on both sides of the camera makes to the nonsensical internal logic of the movie.
It is, basically, a live-action cartoon that has cleverly disguised itself as one of those '80s style adventure-romcoms. It could only have been the work of a very confident or a very brash filmmaker, and so it's not much of a surprise to learn that it was the director's debut. It's much more of a surprise that the director in question was John Patrick Shanley, then hot off his writing Oscar for Moonstruck, and not yet entrenched as an Important Voice in American theater. The film has very little in common with anything else in Shanley's career; it's absolutely nothing like his solitary other project as a film director, 2008's Doubt, in which he adapted his own play as a series of overburdened dramatic images and mismatched performances.
It's the exact opposite kind of filmmaking that shows up in the manic Joe Versus the Volcano. The film is mannered, but it's also unendingly energetic, playing with loopy ideas and bizarre staging, so fizzy and strange that it frequently doesn't register how acerbic the bones of the story are. And the cast is terrific; or the leads are, at least (much of the supporting cast is perfectly fine, but the film simply doesn't rely on them all that much). Hanks relies on his customary amiability to temper the sour bitterness of the character, but doesn't play against the part; 1990 saw him trying on unfriendly performances for this first time, and while Bonfire of the Vanities went all wrong, his work as Joe is as impressive as anything else he did up to that point of his career.
Meg Ryan is the real stand-out though, not least because she plays three characters...
The script isn't afraid to wear its schema on its sleeve: all three women are meant to be read as variations on each other. But they're also three totally distinct personalities. Ryan's job was thus to square a circle and combine both of those conflicting impulses, and save the film by playing the roles with more depth and inner life than Shanley's script, which limits her to a prop in Joe's character development. And, of course, do this while servicing the off-kilter caricature tone of the whole movie. It's an impossible part(s), and Ryan nails it; there aren't really any conversations about what the best work of her career is, since she doesn't have much in the way of a fanbase anymore, but this would unquestionably belong in that conversation.
Like anything with this much ambition, Joe Versus the Volanco stumbles plenty of times, and there's a lot of messiness to go along with the comic inspiration. So of course it's not surprising that the film even now remains forgotten and unloved. But it's a different, special little blast of oddness, and on this its 25th birthday, it pleases me to encourage any and all of you to take a peek at this oddest little relic of the late 1980s.