My Year of Flops (43 page)

A Fairy-Tale Ending, Or, Manic Pixie Dream Girls I Have Known

Constant, Total Amazement Case File #40: Joe Versus The Volcano

Originally Posted June 12, 2007

I was at a greasy spoon recently when I overheard a smartly dressed, seemingly sane woman in her 50s gush to her companion, “Have you ever heard of a movie called
The Other Sister
? It is just delightful. Just a wonderful, wonderful film. Diane Keaton plays a very strict mother whose daughter is disabled. Now this disabled daughter—I don't know whether she is really disabled in real life—is just about the biggest free spirit you would ever want to meet! It is just a wonderful, wonderful lighthearted comedy, and it's just about my favorite film.”

The woman's passionate endorsement of
The Other Sister
served as a poignant reminder that just about every film has a cult, even if it's a cult of one. The world could have
Citizen Kane
and
Casablanca
, but
The Other Sister
belonged to her.

When I laid down the ground rules for My Year Of Flops, I stipulated that I wouldn't cover films with substantial cult followings.
But I've learned from readers and commenters that I am far from alone in my passion for some of the films I've written about. I would venture to say
Joe Versus The Volcano
boasts an even bigger cult than
The Other Sister.
That's one of the great gifts of the Internet: It affords us the opportunity to simultaneously assert our individuality, stray from the pack, and find like-minded communities that share our passion for Pogs or
Mr. Belvedere
or the lesser films of Paul Mazursky. It reminds us that we are not alone, even if our favorite film is
The Other Sister.

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 which 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.