Flashback Review: Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)

From the archives of  The Moving Picture Show. 

March 9, 1990 |  If, as the poet noted, most men lead lives of quiet desperation, then Joe Banks (Tom Hanks) truly is an exceptional fellow: His desperately unhappy life is as noisy and dirty as it is oppressively, soul-killingly bleak.

Joe works as an assistant catalogue clerk for American Panascope, a company that claims hundreds of thousands of “satisfied customers” for its chief  product, petroleum jelly. In his grim, gray office in the factory  headquarters, the fluorescent lighting is relentlessly irritating, the air circulation is stiflingly poor, and the coffee is unspeakable sludge. His boss is a stony-faced despot who gruffly dismisses Joe’s complaints of poor health: “After childhood, nobody feels good. It’s a fact of life.”

One day, when his shakes and headaches are even worse than usual, Joe visits a doctor. And that’s when he gets some good and bad news. The good news is, none of Joe’s varied symptoms is a sign of serious illness. The bad news  is, an intense examination reveals Joe has something called a “brain cloud,” a malady entirely unforeseen and inevitably fatal.

Joe, ashen-faced and amazed, tries to make sense of the diagnosis: “I’m not sick, except for this terminal disease.” The doctor, played with just the slightest shading of lunacy by a straight-faced Robert Stack, nods sagely. “Your brain will fail,” he tells Joe, “followed shortly by your body.”

Most men would be hopelessly distraught, maybe even suicidal, after hearing such news. But, once  again, Joe is an exceptional fellow: He accepts the diagnostic death sentence as the start of his personal liberation. And that liberation in turn is the propelling force behind Joe Versus The Volcano, an epic comedy of goofiness triumphant and nuttiness unbound.

This fine madness is the masterwork of John Patrick Shanley, the esteemed playwright (Danny and the Deep Blue Sea) and Oscar-winning scriptwriter (Moonstruck) who makes his film directing debut with the first great movie comedy of the ‘90s.

There are hints of Metropolis to the Germanic expressionism of the early scenes, and touches of Joseph Campbell to the extended myth-spinning that leads Joe on a quest to live like a king before he dies like a man. And here, there and everywhere, there are bits and pieces of Arthur, The Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz.

More often than anything else, however, there is the imprint of John Patrick Shanley, a writer with a perfect-pitch ear for comically off-kilter dialogue, and an indefatigable gift for inventing full-bodied, vitally  contradictory characters.

Shanley’s last effort as a scriptwriter, The January Man, was a shaggy-dog story posing, unsuccessfully, as a cops-and-killer thriller, though the comic elements almost redeemed it. Joe Versus The Volcano wisely avoids all genre conventions and restrictions — it doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is. And what that is, is so exhilaratingly absurd, so outrageously  inspired, it is a tonic guaranteed to lift even the most crestfallen spirits. Even Joe might have laughed at it after a particularly lousy day at the office.

As Joe, Tom Hanks gives a beautifully precise and grandly funny reactive performance, responding to the eccentrics and oddities around him with equal measures of excitement, amusement and anxious befuddlement. Hanks is an extremely generous actor throughout, instinctively withdrawing to his corner of the screen whenever a co-star or a cameo player has a moment of glory.

Not long after Joe has his fateful medical exam, he’s approached by an overwhelmingly vivacious businessman, Graynamore, played with delightfully crackpot zest by Lloyd Bridges. Graynamore has a meticulously logical, financially alluring and altogether ridiculous proposition: Since Joe is going to die anyway, why doesn’t he do Graynamore a favor, and help the superstitious natives of a remote South Seas island, by jumping into an active volcano?

But wait, here’s the beauty part: Graynamore will pay all of Joe’s expenses, give Joe unrestricted use of gold-plated credit cards, offer Joe first-class travel and accommodations until he reaches the island of Waponi  Woo. (“The name means ‘Little island with a big volcano.’”) Once he arrives, the Waponi tribesmen will treat Joe like visiting royalty — and be really, really grateful that Joe, and not one of them, will make the big leap to appease the angry, lava-spouting god.

Graynamore, who figures to gain mineral rights to the island by providing a human sacrifice, makes a splendidly energetic pitch. Joe considers it for a few seconds, and says, in the matter-of-fact tone of someone agreeing to accompany friends to a ballgame, “Aw right, I’ll do it.” Hanks is generous, yes indeed, but he can swipe back an entire scene with a single line.

Shanley is every bit as generous, spreading the funny stuff around to everyone in the cast. Meg Ryan gets more than her fair share, but that’s because she plays three different roles: DeDe, a mousy secretary who briefly  basks in the glow of Joe’s new-found verve; Angelica, Graynamore’s glossily affected daughter, a would-be artist and half-hearted libertine; and Patricia, Angelica’s disapproving half-sister, the heroine who eventually tries to woo Joe away from his date with the volcano.

Ryan artfully rearranges the equation of sexiness, silliness and sensibility for each woman, so that each adds up to a very specific characterization. If When Harry Met Sally. . . made her a star, then Joe Versus The Volcano will keep Ryan in orbit.

In addition to Stack and Bridges, the wonderful supporting cast includes Ossie Davis as a chauffeur who’s reluctant to offer educated guesses about the meaning of life; Dan Hedaya as Joe’s preternaturally sour boss; and Barry McGovern, an Irish stage actor, as an intensely solicitous salesman who says luggage “is the central preoccupation of my life.” A good thing, too, since the trunks he recommends to Joe come in very handy.

Joe Versus The Volcano is a fairy tale in the old-fashioned Hollywood tradition, informed by a subversively absurdist sensibility. Shanley and  production designer Bo Welch (Beetlejuice) have created their strange new  worlds on studio sound stages, so that everything — shipwrecks, tropical islands, a glorious moonrise at sea — is flagrantly artificial, and altogether magical.

The Waponi Woo natives are among Shanley’s most inspired inventions: Tribesmen who guzzle orange soda, count Hebrews, Druids and Polynesians among their mixed ancestors, and greet visitors to their island with a hearty rendition of “Havah Nagila!”

Joe Versus The Volcano is so audacious in its daffiness, you may have to see it twice. The first time, you might not believe anything could possibly be that funny.

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The (alleged) politics of Forrest Gump

Sixteen years after it received the Oscar for Best Picture, Forrest Gump finally has been officially designated as an all-American classic. No kidding: On Wednesday, Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 box-office phenomenon appeared alongside 24 other “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant films on this year’s list of selections by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

But you know what? That doesn’t mean the movie’s haters won’t keep on hating. Indeed, judging from some of the initial reactions throughout the blogosphere to the National Film Registry honor, Forrest Gump remains, in the eyes of its harshest critics, sentimental hokum at best – and right-wing propaganda at worst.

No, I’m not making that up.

The latest attempts to attack Forrest Gump for real or perceived political incorrectness remind me of two conversations I had with Tom Hanks – the man who earned an Academy Award for memorably playing the movie’s title character – within the space of a year spanning from June 1994 (a few weeks before Forrest Gump opened at theaters and drive-ins everywhere) to June 1995 (less than three months after the Gump-dominated Oscarcast notoriously hosted by David Letterman).

The first encounter occurred in a posh suite of a Los Angeles hotel during a well-attended press junket for Forrest Gump. The second was at Johnson Space Center, during an equally hectic junket for Apollo 13.

Back in the day in Los Angeles, I had a one-on-one chat with Hanks after he completed what turned out to be a not-entirely-pleasant cluster of round-table interviews. Hanks and I are not exactly bowling buddies, so, then as now, I’ve based my impressions of him – as a human being rather than a versatile actor –almost entirely on my observations of his behavior at press gatherings. And at those gatherings, he’s always struck me as one of the more gracious professionals in showbiz.

On that June day in L.A., however, Hanks appeared to me visibly rattled when, during a sporadically tense group interview, a few interviewers bluntly referred to Forrest Gump as a “reactionary” or “right-wing” work. One journalist dissed the dramedy as “a movie Pat Robertson and Ronald Reagan could love.” Another complained bitterly, and at considerable length, about what he claimed was the movie’s depiction of Black Panther radicals and anti-war activists as “snarly, ego-tripping assholes.”

Hanks’ polite but dismissive response to the journalist’s complaint: “Well, I think that’s nonsense.”

Throughout the group interviews I observed, Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis seemed genuinely shocked by any suggestion that they had any sort of hidden agenda. As they saw it, Forrest Gump was an engagingly whimsical and resolutely apolitical story of a slow-talking, slow-witted Southerner who wanders through four decades of American history, touching the lives of both the great and the obscure.

Yes, Forrest displays courage under fire while serving as a soldier during the Vietnam War. And, sure, he doesn’t protest against the war after his return home. But, hey, that doesn’t mean he’s meant to represent President Nixon’s so-called Silent Majority. OK?

But what about the scene where Forrest attends a late-1960s anti-war rally in Washington D.C., and has an edgy confrontation with some impolite activists?

“You know,” Hanks replied, choosing his words carefully as we conversed in his suite, “probably a huge percentage of people involved in anti-war demonstrations really were snarly, ego-tripping assholes. They were equal to the number of beautiful flower children who were truly bent on saving the world.

“Look, I have no great affection for the ‘60s whatsoever” – at the time he spoke, Hanks was days away from turning 38 – “but I don’t think we’re saying anything more than that was a time of great confusion, and everybody was yelling at one another.”

Besides, Hanks noted, even if he did feel nothing but fear and loathing for ’60s-era anti-war protestors, he wouldn’t make a movie just to castigate them. Using a film to push a political agenda simply wasn’t his style, he emphasized. Even Philadelphia – the 1993 drama in which he gave an Oscar-worthy performance as an AIDS-stricken lawyer who sues his former employers for wrongful dismissal -- isn’t his idea of “a message movie.”

“I don’t think you can educate anybody with a movie,” Hanks said. “And I don’t think you can send an overt kind of political or sociological message (that) is going to change anybody’s mind.”

Over the next several months, however, Hanks learned the hard way that, sometimes, “message movies” are in the eye of the beholder.

Forrest Gump went on to be a much bigger hit than Tom Hanks (or, for that matter, Robert Zemeckis) ever could have hoped or expected. At the same time, though, Hanks noted, much to his dismay, that the movie was indeed frequently judged -- by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum -- as a warm-and fuzzy embrace of conservative ideology.

“Honest to God,” Hanks said when I raised the issue one year later at Johnson Space Center, “I didn’t see that coming. I just didn’t see that coming. I don’t think of us involved with the picture did.”

Hanks added that he was especially miffed by Sen. Robert Dole’s effort to lionize Forrest Gump as entertainment that upheld traditional family values. Dismissing “Mr. Dole’s political grandstanding” as “ludicrous,” he wondered aloud: Forrest Gump is in the forefront of good, quality family films? OK, let’s see. Forrest Gump’s mother [played by Sally Field] slept with the principal of the school so Forrest could go there. I guess that must be forgotten in the course of choosing family films. That and the fact that Forrest fathers a child of wedlock” with his sweetheart, played by Robin Wright.

And yet, Dole wasn’t the only person who read Forrest Gump as a movie with a stealth agenda. Many commentators on the right lauded it for the same reasons (or, perhaps more accurately, the same perceptions) that led many commentators – and, yes, film critics – on the left to blast it.

“This obviously is in retrospect,” Hanks said, “but I think it comes down to that very key part of the film that deals with Vietnam. I think it’s because we presented Forrest in Vietnam in a nonpolitical way, and that fed into the conservative revisionist history that says, ‘We lost Vietnam because of subversive activities of the American public back home.’

“And it fed into the left-of-center political circle because we failed to show [the Vietnam War] as amoral and corrupt. Instead, we showed Vietnam as this thing that guys went through, regardless of it being right or wrong. We showed Vietnam as this terrible, horrible thing that happened to these certain guys.”

At this point in the conversation, I felt emboldened to offer a theory – one regarding Hanks’ unpleasant surprise, not the movie’s alleged agenda. As I recall, I said something like this:

“OK, I’m four years older than you. And under most circumstances, that age difference would be insignificant. But because of that difference – I had to worry about being drafted during the Vietnam War, and you didn’t. People my age and older grew up with Vietnam hanging over our heads during most of our formative years. And so for many of us – maybe most of us – the Vietnam War was the defining event in our lives. So every time we see or read anything that involves the Vietnam War – we’re going to instinctively parse it for any kind of political commentary or interpretation.

“But you – and other people your age or younger – might not. And that might be why you were so surprised by the partisan fires this movie stoked.”

(Actually, I don’t think I was quite that eloquent – but, hey, it’s my anecdote.)

Hanks nodded silently, considering what I had said. He didn’t immediately agree. Nor did he disagree. But he acknowledged that his own view of the Vietnam War was not “the same point of view of somebody who had to live in fear of his [draft] lottery number coming up. No matter what happens, I am ex post facto.

“I remember going to the Selective Service office when I was 18, and they said, ‘Listen, you’re not going to have to do this after the first of the year. So if anybody asks you, just tell them you forgot.’ So, for me, it was never an issue.”

Echoing his words from a year earlier, Hanks added: “I have no affection for the ‘60s whatsoever.” By the time the tumultuous decade ended, he was a high school student in Oakland, California. “And I was not on the cutting edge of a social revolution, or a sexual revolution. I was essentially a very confused kid. And by the time I was walking home from school, kind of cognizant of the greater world around me, the sky was full of helicopters dropping tear gas on the people at Berkeley during the People’s Park demonstrations. Huey Newton was in jail for a couple of murders.

“And I figured that, because I was a pretty naïve kid in the first place, and also because I was very confused, and also because I wasn’t on the forefront of either side of that political schism that was going on -- I just thought things were going to hell in a handbag.”

Which most certainly was not an unreasonable response, as anyone who lived through that era will tell you, regardless of how they felt about the Vietnam War, if they’re entirely honest.

On the other hand: Many of the movie’s most virulent detractors will insist that their contempt for Forrest Gump has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with sentimentality. They simply don’t like it because… because… well, because they don’t like it, period. And as I learned a long time ago, you can’t really argue anyone into liking a movie that they don’t. Especially if that movie beat a movie they liked a lot more – did somebody say Pulp Fiction? – in the battle for the top Academy Award.

My own reaction? Well, I greatly enjoyed Forrest Gump when I saw it back in 1994, all by myself in a small theater on the Paramount lot in L.A. (No, I’m not that important: The studio arranged a private screening for me only because I arrived late from Houston, and missed the screening all of the other junketeers attended.) I felt just as favorably disposed toward it when I saw it a second time in an H-Town multiplex a few months later. And I included it on my Top Ten list – alongside Hoop Dreams, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show, Fresh, Nobody’s Fool, Colonel Chabert and, yes, Pulp Fiction -- for 1994.

But I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that, outside of catching the random glimpse of this scene or that scene while channel surfing, I haven’t seen it again since it won its Oscar. Haven’t had the time – or, really, the inclination. Too many new movies to see, too many old movies to catch up with.

Of course, now that it’s been officially designated as an all-American classic…

The Death of Newspapers, Part II: The End of Free-Lancing

From California Progress Report, a very distressing story about the decline in demand for free-lance stories by writers already hit hard by newspaper closings and cutbacks. Money quote: "For me, the freelance life is not sustainable... I need a job of some kind to support my journalism habit." And this: “I used to get up to $750 per article and then I could turn around and market the same article to European magazines … Now I am lucky if I get $350 per article and of course, because of the Internet, I can no longer resell any article. On a daily basis I see offers from as little as $5 to $50 for articles! And worse, I know many writers who are submitting because they don’t have a lot of choice.”

Trust me: I feel their pain. Back in the mid '90s, for a year or two following the closing of The Houston Post, it wasn't uncommon for me to sell the same free-lance interview with a Harrison Ford or a Patrick Swayze to two or three different papers. Hell, I managed to market only slightly different versions of a Tom Hanks interview to five different papers -- including the Los Angeles Times -- around the time Apollo 13 was released. Those were the days, my friend, I thought they'd never end. But they did. (For more illustrations like the one above, check out the website of writer Stephen Beale.)

R.I.P.: Dabbs Greer (1917-2007)

Once again, alas, it appears that the grim reapings of celebrities always come in threes. You might not be familiar with the name Dabbs Greer, but trust me: If you've seen more than a dozen movies in your life, you would recognize his face. And if you're a genuine movie buff and/or chronic TV viewer, you doubtless recall many of the fine performances given by this reliable character actor during his astonishingly prolific career. His last film credit of note was 1999's The Green Mile, in which he movingly portrayed a many-years-later version of the lead character played as younger man by Tom Hanks. But he continued to appear in sitcoms and TV dramas until 2003, when he guested on The Disney Channel's Lizzie McGuire. Think about it: The guy worked with everyone from Humphrey Bogart -- Greer was an uncredited bit player in 1952's Deadline USA -- to Hilary Duff. Cowabunga.

Blogging Oscar, 8:54 pm

Enjoyed the montage of scenes depicting writers in the movies. (Lord knows, I've always been able to relate to the scene in Julia where a frustrated Jane Fonda throws her typewriter out the window.) But after the well-deserved Adapted Screenplay win by William Monahan for The Departed, that lame "horse race" bit with the chintzy wooden-horse icons was pretty shameful. Kudos to Tom Hanks for his not-so-subtle critique with the most sarcastic rely I've ever heard him give a stupid question in public.

Tom Hanks on horseback

Next on Tom Hanks' to-do list: Boone's Lick, his very first Western. Co-scripted by Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain scribes Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana -- and based on McMurtry's novel -- the film will co-star Julianne Moore as "a headstrong woman...who drags her family on a rickety wagon from Boone's Lick, Mo., to the Wyoming fort where her husband lives. Her brother-in-law (Hanks) escorts her on the dangerous journey and along the way falls in love with her." Guess that will complicate things, you think?