Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

"I've been too chickenshit afraid to live my life so I sold it to you for three hundred freakin' dollars a week!"

Huzzah! At last we've arrived at the first (and second, and third) appearance of Hanx's perennial onscreen love interest, Meg Ryan. What is it about these two that just throws sparks? For all his affable everyman likeability, Hanx has never really been what you'd call a sex symbol. Ryan, for her part, is cute as a button, particularly when she lights up with that megawatt smile (which has tragically been destroyed in a series of cosmetic procedures gone horribly awry. RIP). Pair that with Hanx's dimpled grin and you've really got something that can only be described as adorable.

The film opens as industrial employee Joe trudges his way to work among a mass of other corporate zombies all dressed in black, slogging their way into workaday hell garbed entirely in black like mourners at the funeral of the life they imagined for themselves. He attempts to hang his hat on three separate occasions on a broken coat rack, then pours himself a cup of coffee with clumpy non-dairy creamer and seats himself at a desk beneath a buzzing soul-draining fluorescent to await his daily tongue-lashing from the boss (Dan Hedaya) for occurrences that are entirely beyond his control. (Sound familiar? Yeah, me too.) Joe's having a difficult time listening, however, because he doesn't feel good. Joe never really feels good, which is why he's thrown his life savings at doctors in a futile effort to figure out just what the hell is actually wrong with him. On one fateful day, he visits a specialist played by Robert Stack (why don't we ever see Robert Stack in film anymore?*), who informs him that he's suffering from a "brain cloud," a terminal condition that will end his life in 6 months. Realizing he's wasted entirely too much time being a cog in the machine, Joe quits his job and accepts an offer from an eccentric billionaire by the name of Samuel Graynamore who asks him to jump into a volcano on a remote Polynesian island, which the native tribe, called Waponi, (a horrifically offensive mashup of Polynesian, Jewish, and Filipino stereotypes) believe requires a human sacrifice to prevent its imminent eruption.

* Yes, I know he's dead. But he's still got a hell of a lot more emotional range than some living, breathing actors I see these days.

The first of the Ryan trio of characters is DeDe, the secretary in Joe's office whom he's always secretly pined for, but never approached. However, he finds a moment to pay an almost poetic tribute to her mid-tirade as he tells off his boss on his way out the door. 

"I can smell her, like, like a flower. I can taste her, like sugar on my tongue. When I'm 20 feet away I can hear the fabric of her dress when she moves in her chair! Not that I've done anything about it."

Coming from anyone else, it sounds creepy. But from the lips of a man who's suddenly been freed of his inhibitions with the diagnosis of a terminal disease, it manages to sound charming. So charming, in fact, that DeDe accompanies Joe to dinner that evening. Things are going well until Joe reveals his terminal condition. Poor DeDe can't handle the gravitas of the whole thing, so she bolts. Ah well.

The second Ryan incarnation is failed artist and self-described flibbertigibbet Angelica, the first of two daughters of Samuel Graynamore. 

There's not much to like about Angelica, really, but the character is just so absurd that she's fun to watch. Thankfully, she's not in the movie for very long, because her bizarre vocal affectation gets old fairly quickly. Angelica is tasked with the (thankfully) simple errand of escorting Joe to Graynamore's yacht, captained by Graynamore's other daughter,Patricia. This is Meg Ryan #3.

Patricia is not the most pleasant of people, but Joe's unflappable optimism quickly begins to erode her guarded exterior, and by the time a typhoon sinks the yacht and conveniently maroons the pair on the very volcanic island that is Joe's final destination (see what I did there?), the two have forged the sort of rapid, close bond that always seems to result from near-death experiences in the interest of timely plot advancement. In the interim, Joe has revealed the true purpose of his trip to Patricia, whose reaction is the exact opposite of DeDe's, both because it's impossible for her to run very far on a remote island and also because she has decided that she's in love with Joe and has no intention of losing him to a man-hungry volcano. She attempts to persuade him not to make the jump, but when she realizes that his mind is made up, she ultimately resolves to jump with him, asking the Waponi chief to marry the pair so that they can honeymoon in a pool of liquid hot magma.

Well, at least the presentation of the vacation slides will be blessedly brief.

Before the first awkward toast can even begin, the newlyweds make their leap. The volcano, having decided that it wants no part of ruining a destination wedding, and promptly spits the pair back out. Unfortunately for the Waponi, they are now without a human sacrifice, and their island is promptly swallowed up by the sea. An entire culture has been wiped off the face of the planet without ever having earned so much as a National Geographic cover, but on the bright side, our plucky hero has gotten the girl. Don't you just love weddings?

Having been blessed with the gift of the against-the-odds survival rate usually granted to the top-billed talent in romantic comedies, Joe and Patricia manage to escape by climbing aboard some nearly-indestructible steamer trunks Joe had wisely purchased prior to the trip. Fresh off the adrenaline rush of being catapulted out of death's maw, they now have time to settle into domestic bliss and discuss Joe's terminal condition. When he mentions his doctor, Patricia immediately recognizes the name as that one of one of her father's lackeys, and informs Joe that he's been had – apparently the whole thing was a setup by Graynamore to allow him to mine the island for a rare mineral that will presumably make him even more obscenely rich than he already is, and Joe is not, and never was, terminally ill, just apparently very bored. A large moon looming on the horizon, Joe and Patricia drift off on a glassy sea, uncertain of where their travels will take them, but knowing for damn sure that they're going to hold onto those trunks.

When moviegoers think of the Hanks-Ryan pairings, they're far more likely to picture Sleepless in Seattle, or perhaps You've Got Mail. Both films were far more grounded in reality and took themselves quite a bit more seriously than did Joe Versus the Volcano. From start to finish, pretty much everything about the plot and its inhabitants is patently absurd. It begins with the horde of industrial worker bees trudging brainlessly into work like cattle to slaughter and continues straight through to the complete disregard for the laws of geology, thermodynamics, and the continental United States that comprises the ending. The reason it works, however, is because the absurdity is completely consistent. There's little that occurs in the entire film that even approaches conventional logic. If you accept that early on, you can expect to enjoy yourself. Just keep your "I believe" button handy and press it. A lot.

But what, exactly, is the magic that makes Hanks-Ryan work so well? I did a perfunctory Google search on the subject, and to my shock and amazement, came up more or less empty. There were a few articles discussing Hanks and Ryan and their feelings about working with each other (no big surprises – they each admire the other's work and are good friends), but nothing that really attempted to discover exactly where the chemistry really came from.

Perhaps there isn't a big secret to it. Perhaps it's just a pair of consummate professionals who just happen to work well together. I've seen it happen on a smaller scale in community shows I've participated in. I recall one show in particular where the two romantic leads became very good friends offstage and worked beautifully together. When they greeted audience members after the show, a couple of folks actually asked them if they were a real couple. They shared a knowing wink, deciding not to tell the well-meaning fans that he was gay.

The more I think about it, though, I'm not utterly convinced that the pairing of Hanks-Ryan in Joe Versus the Volcano is where the real sparks began. Yes, they were a charming pair, but had they never collaborated again, I'm not sure their coupling would have been terribly memorable. I think the true catalyst came a few years later in the form of a gifted scribe by the name of Nora Ephron, who had penned and was directing Sleepless in Seattle, the now-famous pairing of Hanx-Ryan that almost never was. The role of Annie was first offered to several other actresses, including Julia Roberts, Kim Basinger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jodie Foster, all of whom turned it down before Ryan was finally cast. Hanx wasn't so hot on the idea at first, either. He'd initially passed on the role of Sam, feeling he wasn't right for the part. Ephron worked a little sorcery on the script and presented it to him again, and Hanx signed on. What resulted was a bit of cinematic magic (cinemagic?) that fans continue to rave about, which is no small feat considering that the two main characters share all of a whopping 2 minutes of screen time.

As for Joe and Patricia, their charming whirlwind (literally) romance was, perhaps a bit sadly, eclipsed by the shower of sparks emitted by Sam and Annie, and much like the poor Waponi, sank forgotten beneath the tranquil sea upon which the two lovers drifted, completely unconcerned with what fate held in store for them. Perhaps it was the impossibly huge, luminous moon overhead that assured them that wherever they were headed, the future was bright.