***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Paul Giamatti, Harvey Pekar, Hope Davis, Joyce Brabner, Judah Friedlander, Toby Radloff, and James Urbaniak
Directed & written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, from the comic books and graphic novels “American Splendor” and “Our Cancer Year” by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner
2003 R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2003
“American Splendor” is the wonderful tale of a curmudgeon just a little too crotchety and tightly-wound to face the world, and the clever way in which he learns to deal with it. He is in love with pessimism, with things going wrong, with scowling and complaining, with being old before his time. He scratches his head even when it doesn’t itch. He doesn’t know how to be happy. In short, I think he’s a hell of a guy. And “American Splendor” is a hell of a movie, mixing fact with fiction, re-enactments with documentary-style interviews, and sometimes even live-action with animation.
Life has not been too kind to Our Hero, but we’re never quite sure how responsible he is for the life he hates. Twice divorced, his posture is terrible, his social skills are not top-notch, he’s overweight, his apartment is a sty, and his job as a file clerk has to be mind-numbing. To make things worse, he lives in Cleveland, which has to be the most depressingly gloomy, perpetually overcast, and steel-blackened city in the world, at least the way it’s shot in “American Splendor.” So he turns to art, not as an escape, but as a way to understand his own existence. And not just any art, but comic books, and he eventually gains popularity (or at least notoreity) with his line of semi-autobiographical comic books, which he names “American Splendor.”
He is Harvey Pekar, not a made-up dude, but the real-life creator of “American Splendor” comics. The movie is an examination of his character and his day-to-day battles with everything (mostly himself). When we meet the adult Harvey in 1975 he has just lost his voice, and therefore the power to complain. This, more than the departure of wife no.2, seems to be the last straw, and he must find a new venue to cry out against the world. He is helped into underground comics by the famous cartoonist Roger Crumb, who’s already had his own movie, the aptly-titled “Crumb.” Harvey, who complains that he “cannot even draw a straight line,” begins carving his little stickfigures with an almost angry earnesty that’s nothing short of endearing.
Years later we meet Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis), who is Harvey’s soulmate and becomes his third wife. In many ways their problems are no different than those of every couple, but they are heightened by his sense of melodramatic doom and gloom, and her almost Woody Allen-esque hypochondria. When Harvey finds a lump on his hooty-hoots, it’s almost as if the two of them willed it to be there.
As Pekar, actor Paul Giamatti is slouching, bug-eyed, belly-scratching, and clad in clothes that are as unflattering as they are uncomfortable. His default reaction to just about everything is to curl back his top lip into a grimace. But, in a series of interviews sprinkled throughout the film, we meet the real Harvey Pekar, as well as the real Joyce Brabner, and he casually discusses comics, jazz, himself. What’s amazing about the movie is that, even as we’re reminded again and again that Giamatti is not Pekar—and even as Giamatti breaks character, walks off the set, and has a snack—I still cared about Giamatti’s Pekar and was still carried along by his story. Giamatti’s performance is a triumph of infidelity; watching the real Harvey and the fake Harvey side-by-side, we realize that Giamatti is far from slavish to imitating the real man. His version of Pekar is as much his creation and a full-blooded individual on his own, separate from the real person, just as the comic book version of Harvey must be different than the man who created it.
“American Splendor” is like that, mixing reality, recereations, and different fictions with each other. It’s by no means the first movie to do this; in fact, Jamie Wolf of MSN’s “Slate” does a intriguing comparison of “American Splendor” and “Annie Hall.” Pekar’s infamous trouble with David Letterman is played out in a combination of real footage, with Pekar and Letterman, and new stuff, with Giamatti and a shadowed stand-in. But the movie is even more inventive, and goes so far as including animated sequences in the style of the “American Splendor” comics. What is the purpose of this doubling? Maybe it’s just to reflect how the comic works, in its doubling of real Harvey and comic Harvey.
All along the way, amidst these storytelling tricks by writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, we are fascinated by this guy Pekar. He is alternately a superweirdo and an everyman, whose pessimism is both infuriating and hilarious, who is at times a complete original and yet someone we’ve all met before. In his work, he’s always striving for reality, for not selling out, for being true to himself, for not being taken over by any giant company. Yet there are two neat scenes, one in which Joyce urges him to create “Our Cancer Year” so that he can distance himself from his illness, and the other in which she discovers he’s started drinking her brand of tea. In the first instance he finally gives in to the escapism of art, and in the second he’s realized that if you are too “true to yourself,” you alienate other ideas and experiences.
Do you need to know a lot, or anything, about the “American Splendor” comic books to appreciate this movie? Nope. I didn’t know squat about them, but I am now intrigued. The movie provides a good summary of them, mostly in the opening credits. The best recent comic book movies are like this and “Unbreakable,” which don’t simply transport the comic book to the screen, but examine the appeal of comics in general, to both writers and readers. With their, let’s face it, vulgar images, comics are a primal artform, that taps whatever response they are going to get from us quickly and unconsciously. A big winner at the Sundance Film Festival, “American Splendor” is also another success story for the “dramedy,” the combination of comedy and drama, which is rapidly becoming l'arme de choix for serious independent filmmakers—and why not? Everything in life is both funny and serious, even if guys like Harvey Pekar are seemingly unaware of how hilarious their problems can be to the rest of us.
Finished October 9, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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