MOVIE REVIEWS : Romance Under the ‘Volcano’

The throwaway elegance of Tom Hanks, apparently doomed but ready to live his last days to the hilt, and a bravura trio of roles for Meg Ryan are only two of the elements that make “Joe Versus the Volcano” bubble. (It’s citywide.) Romantic and preposterous all at once, it’s actually a funny, endearing fable about courage, love and faith.

So endearing that the flatness about its last few minutes manages not to sink the picture. The ending has a quick, cheerful texture that usually signals the presence of market research or audience-testing. Hard to know for certain, but there’s a quickly-tied-together feeling to it blessedly missing from the rest of the movie.

To some it may not even matter; with an Alan Rudolph sort of seductiveness, “Joe” creates its own world, then Shanghais us into it. By the movie’s end, we may be such goners that we don’t fuss when it ends in less of a burst of inventiveness than it unfolded.

Witty, disarming and beautiful, “Joe” is the tip-off that John Patrick Shanley is at least as distinctive a director as he has already been a playwright and screenwriter--with “Four Corners,” “The January Man” and “Moonstruck” before this. It’s a lovely debut.

The slyly stylized production opens with Hanks’ Joe Banks marching off to his wretched job at a medical-supply conglom, American Panascope, with hundreds of other gray nonentities. There, among looming sets that the German Expressionists would have died for, he and DeDe (a lank-haired, nasal Meg Ryan) work for a dumb, despicable boss (Dan Hedaya) under buzzing fluorescent lights that indeed seem to be sucking their eyeballs.

Presumably, Joe would be there yet, if his hypochondria hadn’t steered him to yet another doctor (Robert Stack). This one is different; he breaks the news that Joe has the ideal movie disease, a brain cloud. No symptoms. Perfect health, then, powie! His prescription: Live the time he has left to its fullest.

Next day, the means with which Joe can live it appear at his ratty apartment. Like a leprechaun on LSD, Lloyd Bridges’ billionaire Graynamore offers him the world--or at least unlimited credit in this world--and at the end of it, a quick, sacrificial dive into an angry volcano half an ocean away. It’s something about the rare mineral on this island of Waponi Woo that Graynamore must have.

Joe has had a taste of heroism from the days when he was a fireman, before American Panascope’s deadly grip. A personal big-bang exit holds not too many terrors for him, and besides, this is a fairy tale. He’s on.

And we’re with him, meeting Graynamore’s pair of daughters, half-sisters Angelica and Patricia (Meg Ryans Nos. 2 and 3), both of whose lives are lived in reaction to their father’s money.

Red-haired Angelica, a painter and a poet, is a hip L.A. flower. She talks with a breathy gargle that merges Katharine Hepburn with a Valley girl. Surprisingly touching, Angelica’s only drawback is being on the screen too little.

Patricia, blond, brave and the straightest of the three Ryan characters, is skipper of the neat little schooner Tweedle Dee. Without knowing Joe’s history, she’s there to sail him to Waponi Woo, although during the trip--watching him taste life for the first time--she becomes aware of his essential gallantry and uniqueness. Shanley and his inspired collaborators--production designer Bo Welch, cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, costume designer Colleen Atwood, editor Richard Halsey and composer Georges Delerue--make it a journey worthy of Robert Louis Stevenson and Maurice Sendak, with just of hint of David Byrne thrown in for the sheer surreal unexpectedness of it. For a light comedy, the dialogue has ballast: How interesting to have Patricia admit to soul sickness--that great undiagnosed contemporary malady; to have her suggest something as Jungian as the pull that the sea has on one’s dreams when one sleeps on a boat, or to have the final decision facing Joe and Patricia involve a literal leap of faith.

To amplify such thoughts, we have the movie’s exquisite visions on land and sea: Joe’s apartment-front, every window glowing with a different brilliant color, the same colors that will blaze from the Chinese paper lanterns on Patricia’s cozy little boat. A low-hanging moon at sea, magnificent enough to bring tears of gratitude to Joe’s face, thankful simply for his life--whatever little bit of it he may have left.

“Joe Versus the Volcano”(rated PG) overflows with these visions and a lot that are more low-down and hilarious, like costumer Atwood’s complete visual anthropology of the Waponi Woo. There hasn’t been this much fun to look at on a screen since “Spinal Tap.”

Hanks and all the Ryans are splendid. Joe is anchored by Hanks’ bedrock humanity and decency, and Shanley has let Hanks’ physical puckishness have free rein during the floating-trunk sequences. The only complaint to be made about Ryan’s three very different characters is . . . more .

Other diversions along the way are Ossie Davis’ empathetic limo driver, who will show Joe how to dress but not who he is, since it’s taken Davis’ character his whole life to learn that for himself. Then there is a veritable sensualist of a luggage salesman (Barry McGovern), whose fabulous trunks become almost characters in their own right.

If you wish for more depth at the ending, and perhaps at other points too, you’re not alone; the trick is to savor the trip along the way and to hope that Shanley keeps his style and deepens his substance with his next film.

‘JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO’

A Warner Bros. presentation of an Amblin Entertainment production of a film by John Patrick Shanley. Producer Teri Schwartz. Executive producers Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall. Writer/director John Patrick Shanley. Camera Stephen Goldblatt. Production design Bo Welch. Art director Tom Duffield. Set director Cheryl Carasik. Editor Richard Halsey. Original music by Georges Delerue. Sound Keith A. Wester. With Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Abe Vigoda, Dan Hedaya, Barry McGovern, Ossie Davis.