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Reviews:
The First and the Best Hanks/Ryan Team-Up
by Christian De Matteo
I saw Joe Versus the Volcano for the first time with my
parents in theaters. The year was 1990 and I was 13 years old.
I loved it.
I saw Joe Versus the Volcano most recently a week ago.
The year is 2005 and I am a week shy of 28.
And I love it.
What isn't this movie is a much better question than
what is it. First of all, the film is funny, crazy, offbeat funny.
Hanks and Hedaya in an office sequence talking about the validity of a
vapid corporate job? Simply brilliant. Follow this up with a
great Lloyd Bridges performance with Tom Hanks offering him a new job...
of jumping into a volcano, after the date with Meg Ryan's first of three
characters in the movie AFTER Joe meets with "Doctor" Robert Stack to
discuss his (wave hand forward and back over center strip of skull)
braincloud, before we meet two twin sisters both played perfectly by
Meg Ryan, before we meet the coolest and deepest chauffeur in history,
the late and great Ossie Davis and before we get to see the Yiddish
Indian tribe led by Abe Vigoda with a brief, early appearance of Nathan
Lane... and not a bit of this isn't laugh out loud funny.
So why isn't this movie part of the regular rotation on
network television weekend schedules? Because, beyond the humor,
which is already a tad too advanced for the scores of regular TV
watchers, the movie is above all else, deeply philosophical. Not
in any esoteric, arrogant and snooty way, but philosophical about the
things that matter in this country, easily summed up as life, love and
the pursuit of happiness. What is it to be happy and do we allow
ourselves to find it?
My favorite shot in the movie, wonderfully directed by
the same gentleman who penned it, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright John
Patrick Shanley is early on, after Joe finds out what is ailing him at
the doctor's office and he's standing in the door way when a woman with
a rather large dog passes. The camera pans back and further still
back as Joe first pets the dog, than embraces him with some kind of
understanding and compassion that perhaps they can understand each
other, the dog on the woman's leash, cared for and loved but not free,
and Joe, stuck on the leash of societal expectations, alone and
certainly not free.
The question now is only, is it society's leash... or is
it self-imposed imprisonment.
And as we contemplate these matters so much at the heart
of so many of our issue, we laugh, because life is funny, in fact, to
quote paraphrase the great playwright and short story master Anton
Chekov , all things that happen to human beings are funny. We need
only find the humor and the humor is to be found in the freedom and the
pathway to happiness and humor and freedom may be a jagged, rocky
path... but it's always an adventure just waiting to be had.
Better than Sleepless in Seattle, much better than
You've Got Mail, and absolutely one of the great Hanks performances, Joe
Vs. The Volcano is a movie to own and watch frequently.
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