by Nathan Rabin
Joe Versus The Volcano has proved especially popular in self-help circles, where its message of self-actualization through letting go of the fears and anxieties that hold us back has found an appreciative audience. Volcano has the unusual quality of being simultaneously frothy and quietly profound. As my A.V. Club colleague Scott Tobias wrote, the film is about “nothing less than the joy of being alive.” It’s an incandescent trifle that nevertheless speaks to deep spiritual questions. What does it mean to be alive? Is it a gift wasted on the living? Does impending death inherently give life greater meaning?
Writer-director John Patrick Shanley—the successful screenwriter and playwright behind Moonstruck, who didn’t direct another film until his 2008 adaptation of his play Doubt—establishes a storybook tone with an opening scrawl reading, “Once upon a time there was a man named Joe who had a very lousy job.” This introduces us to our hero (Tom Hanks), a miserable sad sack with a ghostly pallor who joins an army of the damned as they trudge zombie-like to work each day at American Panascope, a gothic factory out of Charles Addams’ morbid imagination. Hanks works for Mr. Waturi (the eternally Nixonian Dan Hedaya) at a company that manufactures both frightening-looking medical implements and human misery. It leaves its employees soul sick from buzzing fluorescent lights and deadening routines, stuck in a corporate hellhole that cheerfully trumpets dubious distinctions like “Home of the Rectal Probe,” “50 Years of Petroleum Jelly,” and the particularly suspicious “712765 Satisfied Customers.”
Waturi essentially repeats endless minor variations on the same bit of dialogue—“But can he do the job? I know he can get the job, but can he do the job? I’m not arguing that with you. I’m not arguing that with you. I’m not arguing that with you. I’m not arguing that with you”—in a hellish loop. The effect is twofold: The repetition develops a hypnotic rhythm, and it conveys that Waturi has been having this same circular, meaningless conversation for years, if not decades. He’s locked in the poisonous machine from which Joe is about to extricate himself permanently. When Joe complains that he doesn’t feel well, Waturi responds with words that sum up the gray universe Joe currently inhabits: “You think I feel good? Nobody feels good. After childhood, it’s a fact of life. I feel rotten. So what? I don’t let it bother me.”
So it’s almost a relief when raging hypochondriac Joe learns from Dr. Ellison (Robert Stack) that he’s contracted a mysterious condition called a “brain cloud” and has six months to live. Joe has been dying a long, slow, painful death since quitting the fire department years earlier. His impending departure from this world liberates him from the grim concerns of day-to-day life, especially after beetle-browed Manic Pixie Gazillionaire industrialist Samuel Harvey Graynamore (Lloyd Bridges) offers to let him “live like a king and die like a man” by sailing to the tropical island of Waponi Wu to appease its inhabitants by ritualistically sacrificing himself, jumping into a volcano so Graynamore can seize their natural resources as a reward.
Joe is a man reborn. He quits his job in a flurry of righteous indignation and asks out mousy coworker DeDe (Meg Ryan), who is turned on and a little terrified by Joe’s newfound ferocity and lust for life. On their date, a skyline that loomed lifeless and dour as a lump of coal during the American Panascope sequences now seems lit from within by all the colors of the rainbow. Like Joe, it was once dead but now seems gloriously alive.
After scaring away DeDe with news of his imminent death via brain cloud, Joe learns about style from debonair limo driver Marshall (Ossie Davis, that sonorous-voiced exemplar of dignity and grace), who admonishes his slovenly protégé to do the right thing and splurge on dapper duds. It’s a tricky role that borders on Magical Negro territory, but Davis pulls it off with such understated finesse that he makes materialism seem incongruously spiritual, as if getting the right clothes, accessories, and hairstyle are matters of profound moral importance.
Joe then ventures deep into Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory. In Los Angeles, Joe meets Graynamore’s eccentric daughter Angelica (Ryan again, in a sparkly bustier and a halo of red curls), a pill-popping, deeply troubled poet/painter/flibbertigibbet with a breathless trill of a voice. Under her bubbly façade, she’s broken and sad; she’s less someone who can save Joe than a wounded creature in need of saving.
Existential ennui runs in the family. Angelica’s more practical half-sister, Patricia (Ryan, yet again, now liberated from mousy wigs and hair dye, and almost oppressively adorable), retrieves Joe from Angelica and travels with him via a yacht headed to Waponi Wu, and explains, “We’re on a little boat for a while and I’m soul sick. You’re going to see that.”
As with Joe, it takes a brush with death to re-ignite Patricia’s lust for life. When their yacht capsizes during a typhoon, Patricia lingers unconscious, hovering somewhere between life and death for days. Joe occupies himself by cranking up a transistor radio playing “Come Go With Me” and launching into a gloriously geeky dance. His exuberance is infectious, his charm undeniable.
In Joe Versus The Volcano, Shanley smartly allowed songs to play long enough to brood, sulk, bleed, and develop a life of their own. After Joe learns of his brain cloud, Shanley lets Ray Charles’ majestic take on “Ol’ Man River” linger long enough for its broken-down grace to shine through and illuminate Hanks’ miserable existence. A soundtrack that segues from the pessimism of “Sixteen Tons” to the infectious ebullience of “Good Loving” reflects Joe’s dramatic evolution from suicidal despair to rapturous joy.
Before a death sentence allowed him to finally live, Joe couldn’t imagine a world beyond his all-encompassing sadness; to him, history was destiny and life a long, joyless slog to the grave. He couldn’t see the big, beautiful world beyond the fluorescent lights and ominous smokestacks belching out black clouds of toxic smoke at the factory where he sold his soul for $300 a week. Now Joe sees and feels everything: the majesty of a moon that dwarfs and consoles him, the beautiful melancholy of Patricia, the whole transcendent, aching wonder of the world.
Joe embraces his destiny, but he’s come too far in too short a time to end it all. Joe and Patricia, having proclaimed their love for each other and gotten the quickest of quickie weddings, leap into the volcano together. But, as if sensing their newfound vitality, it spits them out into an ocean that sparkles like diamonds.
Oh, and that brain cloud? It’s not a real medical condition but rather a sinister scheme to trick Joe into sacrificing himself. Joe and Patricia’s future is uncertain; their world is now ripe with potential as they sail on to their next big adventure.
While gazing at Joe in the moonlight, Patricia earlier reflected, “My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement.” For 102 minutes, Shanley gives us a glimpse of what that must feel like.
It’s easy to see why a cult has embraced a film considered a big disappointment upon its original release. In traveling an elegantly simple line from fatalism to optimism, Joe Versus The Volcano appeals to our sense that the world can be whatever we want it to be, that we are the masters of our own destiny. It’s a film of bold, unabashed sincerity, a life-affirming fable about how failure can become success as long as we don’t abandon hope. That’s a lesson equally applicable to Joe and to many of the Case Files in this book, orphans just waiting for people to look at them with fresh eyes and recognize the beauty and truth in films haphazardly tossed into the dustbin of history by folks unwilling to look beyond their initial failure.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Secret Success
John Patrick Shanley On Joe Versus The Volcano
John Patrick Shanley has written 24 plays, including Doubt (2004), which won a Pulitzer Prize, and Tony, Obie, and Golden Globe awards. In addition to his playwriting, Shanley has written the screenplay for the movies Five Corners, January Man, Alive, Congo, and the romantic comedy Moonstruck (1987), for whi
ch he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His experience directing Joe Versus The Volcano scarred him to the point where he didn’t direct another film until the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Doubt in 2008.
John Patrick Shanley: Joe Versus The Volcano was actually an autobiographical film. I worked for a medical supply company that had terrifying medical instruments and artificial testicles and all that stuff, and I was very depressed [Laughs.] at the time that I was there. And then, by dint of writing movies, I ended up on a yacht off of L.A., going to Catalina, in just complete shock that I had come from the Bronx and ended up in this completely different environment because I wrote movies. The film was kind of an exploration of that strange path. It wasn’t so much a movie about other movies as it was a movie about my perception of the things I was experiencing.
Nathan Rabin: When did you start working on the screenplay for Joe Versus The Volcano, and how did the story evolve?
JPS: What happened was, I wrote Joe as a spec screenplay, and I said to my agent, I’ve never said this before, “I think Steven Spielberg might like this.” She sent it off to him, and then the Writers Guild strike hit. When I won the Academy Award for Moonstruck, I was on strike, so that was in 1987. While I was out there, Spielberg called me and said, “I read this screenplay. I really like it. I want to make it, and I think you should direct it.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “We should meet.” And I said, “I can’t, I’m on strike.” And he said, “You can meet me as a director. The directors aren’t on strike.” And I said, “Oh, okay.”
So I went over, and we talked, and we hit it off. We ended up working together for the better part of five years. Joe was one of the things we did, but we hung out and did a lot of stuff until I couldn’t take the whole thing anymore and went back to New York. Actually, I worked with him from New York for a while too, but I just had to move on into other stuff.
So then when the strike was over, we went into pre-production and did the film, but it was a big, drawn-out preproduction. It was five months of pre-production, and then like a 70-something-day shoot, and then six months of postproduction. It was endless. So by the time it was over, I felt like my whole life had dried up and blown away. Then when the movie got this bad reception, I just thought, “Man, I’ve sacrificed everything to do this. I’ve been away from home for so long that I don’t have any friends anymore, and I never want to go through this again.” So that’s what sort of drove me away from directing movies for a few years.
NR: I’ve read that you had trouble with Warner Bros. making the film.
JPS: It was a very basic thing. In pre-production, I storyboarded the entire movie. I brought in Mark Canton, who was one of the heads of Warner Bros. at that time, and I think Terry Semel. Terry Semel and Bob Daly were the heads of Warner Bros., and then Mark Canton was under them, him and Lucy Fisher. I went through this certainly with Mark Canton, Lucy Fisher, and I basically showed them the entire film, and they loved it. They said, “This is great, fantastic.” Then I started shooting the movie, and they were like, “What’s this?” And I said, “This is the movie.” I shot exactly what I said I was going to shoot.
They were astonished and frightened of this at every step of the way, and I felt like I was in some sort of surreal conversation. I was like, “How can they be surprised?” I was so forthcoming with this information. They began to send voluminous notes to me about things that I should cut, things I should do differently, and I would have none of it. I offered to leave. I said, “Look, I’ll go home,” and this was in the middle of shooting. It happened three different times. One time, I called the car to take me to the airport, and each time they would back down. And they would say, “No, no.” [Indistinct grumbling.]
Then the line producer came to me and said they weren’t going to release the money to build the volcano, and this is—I don’t know exactly how far, but it was way into the shoot. And I said, “What are they gonna call it, Joe Versus The? [Laughs.] What are you talking about? What do you mean they’re not going to build the volcano?” They tried to hold this over my head, that they weren’t going to build the volcano, and I said, “Of course we’re going to build the volcano. What the hell are you talking about?” In the end, they had to release the money, and we built the volcano, but it was that kind of thing all through the movie. So it was very wearying, because all I was getting back was complete non-enthusiasm and negative comments and threats, and I was like, “I don’t need this shit, let me go home.”
NR: It seems like one of the reasons people responded to Joe Versus The Volcano was that it had a very clear, unique vision. That seems to scare studios.
JPS: It didn’t connect with the broad audience. People went and saw it. It sold some tickets and it had its fans, but it was just a different time, you know? I just did a play, and there was some joke in the play, and before Barack Obama was elected, people laughed at the joke, but after he was elected they stopped, because it was a cynical joke.
And suddenly everybody was a true believer again, and that’s how fast the culture changes sometimes. When I did Joe, I said to the cameraman, “I want you to treat the camera like it weighs 5,000 pounds and is difficult to move.” Because I was just desperately tired of the highly mobile camera that was just doing these circular shots around round tables for no reason in movie after movie that I was seeing. I wanted to make a movie that was shot differently, that was edited differently, and that left significant time for the audience to have thoughts and feelings. So if an audience didn’t want that time, they thought the movie was slow. I was saying, “No, spend some time within this frame, there’s some stuff going on in this frame. Give yourself a second to pick up what it is.” And they were not there. They were someplace else. Though, you know, Joe Versus The Volcano wasn’t a financial failure. It cost $39 million, including Tom, and made $40 million.
NR: Why do you think it was perceived as a failure?
JPS: I think these things just sort of take over in a culture, and it came out of New York, because the New York Times hated the film and gave it a very bad review. It was a film that wasn’t in sync at all with the times. A lot of audiences just didn’t seem to have that music in them. They were in a different place. The rhythm of the film was very different for them. In the intervening years, it seems as though quite a lot of people have found that rhythm.
Full Circle Case File #1, Take 2: Elizabethtown
Originally Posted January 25, 2007; Revised
I’d like to end with a return to the beginning. Three years ago, I began a long, strange trip through cinematic failure with an essay about 2005’s Elizabethtown, the first My Year Of Flops Case File, and one of the primary inspirations for the series. When we first contemplated turning My Year Of Flops into a book, my editor Keith proposed that I revisit Elizabethtown at the end of the process. I’ve now seen the film three times; the first before it came out, the second for the first My Year Of Flops entry, and now for the very last Case File of the book.
The idea was to look at the film that began it all with fresh eyes, to see how, or if, the journey changed me. Had I, in the parlance of lobbyists, gone native? Had I spent so much time trying to see the good in films generally considered unambiguously bad that I was capable of appreciating anything, no matter how wretched? So I decided to rewatch Elizabethtown shortly before turning in the book, and I was shocked, horrified, and strangely delighted to discover just how radically my take on it had shifted. This journey has changed me. I’m in a better place emotionally. For example, I no longer consider joy and happiness my enemies. So I’m a much more receptive audience for Cameron Crowe when he evangelizes for community, kindness, and common decency. Three years of My Year Of Flops have instilled in me an eagerness to see the good in everything.
Elizabethtown is a remarkable specimen in the history of cinematic failure, in that it is both a flop and a meta-meditation on failure. So when its characters deliver aphorisms about the secret glory of failure (“Those who risk,
win.” “No fiasco ever began as a quest for mere adequacy.” “You have five minutes to wallow in the delicious misery. Enjoy it, embrace it, discard it. And proceed.”), they seem to be commenting on the film and preemptively consoling its creator.
When I first saw Elizabethtown, it rattled my soul. I was apoplectic. I came close to stopping random strangers on the street and complaining about it. Though I had been primed by months of bad buzz, I could not believe that a man as talented as Crowe could create a film this singularly, devastatingly bad.
Elizabethtown is incredibly ballsy in a girly-man sort of way. If, as the Smiths proposed, it’s easy to laugh and hate but takes strength to be gentle and kind, then Crowe is the world’s strongest man and Elizabethtown is his masterpiece, a film of hardcore niceness and explicit sensitivity.
The film is an auteurial endeavor in the truest sense: Crowe lurks proudly behind every unnecessarily verbose wisecrack, every lovingly handcrafted bit of homemade philosophy, every cutesy exchange. And that bugged the hell out of me the first time around. And the second time around. I resented that the film was populated less by human beings than magical sprites whose lives seemingly revolved around teaching a sad young man that it’s a wonderful world even if you’re responsible for the athletic-shoe design equivalent of the Hindenburg. Rewatching it I found this vision of the universe as infinitely kind oddly touching. In the past few years my defenses have become less formidable, perhaps because the world has been very kind to me as well; I have a wonderful girlfriend, a great job, have put out some books, and inexplicably have a semi-indulgent audience for my foolishness.
After watching Elizabethtown three times, I became a cultist by default. I have spent 369 minutes in Elizabethtown. I came to know the geography awfully well. I discovered that I was looking at Elizabethtown all wrong. As a film about human beings residing in the American South, it’s preposterous, overwritten, mannered, and precious. But as a big-hearted fairy tale populated by enchanted creatures that takes place in a Kentucky that exists only in Crowe’s imagination, it’s strangely irresistible as well as preposterous, overwritten, mannered, and precious. I checked my cynicism at the door and gave myself over to the beguiling tenderness of Crowe’s vision. (And to the music in his iPod. Elizabethtown is ragingly imperfect, but its soundtrack is a thing of beauty.)
