(Credits: Far Out / David Shankbone)
Meg Ryan started acting in the early 1980s, but it wasn’t until 1989’s When Harry Met Sally that she became a star. The combination of Rob Reiner’s direction, Nora Eprhon’s razor-ship script, and Ryan and Billy Crystal’s chemistry made for an exquisite rom-com that still remains the high water mark of the genre. Ryan wasn’t a one-hit wonder, either. She went on to become the reigning rom-com queen of the ’90s with movies like Sleepless in Seattle, French Kiss, and You’ve Got Mail.
Not all of her movies were hits, though, even when all the ingredients for success were in place. In 1990, she starred with Tom Hanks in the film Joe Versus the Volcano, a fantastical romance about a man who, knowing that he is terminally ill, travels to the South Pacific to throw himself into an erupting volcano. It had a lot going for it. Steven Spielberg was the executive producer, and the director, John Patrick Shanley, had recently won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Moonstruck, a romantic comedy that is still a beloved entry into the genre.
Joe Versus the Volcano is overstuffed with allegory and symbolism. The terminal illness is a ‘brain cloud’ that Joe contracts while working as an office drone in a workplace that makes Severance’s Lumon Industries look like a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. Meanwhile, Ryan plays three characters (differentiated by wigs, naturally). It is, to put it kindly, a wild ride, and most critics thought it was a complete and utter disaster.
One critic who did not hate it, however, was Roger Ebert, who happened to be one of the most respected voices in film criticism. To be more specific, he adored it. In his three-and-a-half out of four-star review, he praised it for its originality, writing, “During the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano, my heart began to quicken, until finally, I realised a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before.”
It was not, he acknowledged, “an entirely successful movie,” but he was unwavering in his appreciation for its fresh, uplifting approach to life. “What’s strongest about the movie is that it does possess a philosophy, an idea about life,” he wrote, “That at night, in those corners of our minds we deny by day, magical things can happen in the moon shadows.”
His rapturous praise did very little for the film’s prospects at the box office. It had a relatively small budget of $25million and only managed to make back $39m. Shanley pivoted hard after that, writing the script for the 1993 survivalist drama Alive about the real-life plane crash in 1972 involving a Uruguayan rugby team.
Luckily, the flop did not slow the momentum of Ryan and Hanks’s careers. They went on to star in Sleepless in Seattle in 1993, which became another timeless classic in their careers and has all but eclipsed Joe Versus the Volcano. Their chemistry was so winning that they re-teamed in 1998 for You’ve Got Mail.
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