American Splendor Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)September 16th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
Written and directed by Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
With Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis
Rated R, 101 minutes
"You should try believing in something bigger than yourself," a friend tells Harvey Pekar. "It might cheer you up."
There is precious little in Harvey's relentlessly ordinary life as a file clerk in a V.A. hospital to cheer him up. But he has managed to accomplish something bigger than his poor existence. Harvey is the creator of American Splendor comics, an underground comic book series based on events and observations drawn from his own life.
The idea sprang from his acquaintance with R. Crumb (James Urbaniak), now revered as the ruling deity in the underground comics firmament, when they met as young record collectors at a garage sale in the '70s. "At least when you die you'll leave something behind," Harvey grumbles to Crumb one afternoon. "That's better than what I'll leave, which is nothing." "That's true," Crumb agrees.
A light bulb goes on over Harvey's head. He grids out a few pieces of typing paper into comic book panels, scribbles in stick figures, and writes word balloons taken from his own dyspeptic daily grind. He shows the work to Crumb. "This is great," says Crumb. "Mind if I take it home and illustrate it?" And a comic book is born.
The husband-and-wife documentary team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman has made the inspired decision to turn the story behind American Splendor into a movie. It's not quite a biopic, it's not quite a documentary. It has elements of both, but it also has elements of comic books and a few other things. Another inspired decision was to cast Paul Giamatti ("Storytelling", "Man on the Moon") as Harvey. Giamatti has a tough job. Not only does he have a character to create, but he has the comic book character, as drawn by Crumb and a succession of other artists, to compete with. And he has the real life Harvey Pekar looking over his shoulder constantly, in voice-overs and in cutaway interview and documentary footage.
But to say that Giamatti pulls it off would be faint praise. He triumphs. He's an actor whose face will be familiar to moviegoing audiences who would never be able to supply the name. The name is perhaps more familiar from his father, Bart Giamatti, who served as Yale's youngest president in the mid-'80s, and then in 1989 became the Commissioner of Baseball who banned Pete Rose for gambling. The younger Giamatti attended Choate and Yale and Yale Drama, which lends a shadow irony to a hilarious dispute he has with his nerdy friend Toby (Judah Friedlander) about the move "Revenge of the Nerds". "They're preppie, Ivy League nerds," he tells Toby, "not real, ordinary slob nerds like us."
Harvey's fame as the author and subject of a comic book pays off in unexpected ways. He becomes a regular guest on David Letterman, until he gets disgruntled one night and denounces the network's parent company on the air. But the best payoff for his blue-collar fame comes when underground comics fan Joyce Brabner (the remarkable Hope Davis, also currently in "The Secret Lives of Dentists") can't get hold of a recent issue of "American Splendor". She writes Harvey, and the upshot of it all is that she comes to Cleveland and they get married . Harvey and Joyce are still married. They both appear in the documentary parts of the movie. Joyce spends a lot of her time diagnosing personality disorders in their acquaintances ("megalomaniac"..."borderline autistic"....). When Harvey was diagnosed with testicular cancer, Joyce got into the family act herself, writing and producing a graphic comic book memoir called Our Cancer Year, chronicling their battle against the disease as a means of therapy to engage Harvey in a positive way.
The filmmakers have done a remarkable job of integrating the profusion of elements that come into this story and make the movie unique. There are comic book panels of the graphic Harvey with drawings by Crumb and other artists, and the camera moves across them to panels where the visual changes to live action, with Mr. Giamatti taking over as Harvey. Then they cut to a studio where the real Harvey sits being interviewed, talking in his raspy voice about "that actor playing me." For good measure, Harvey and Joyce attend a San Francisco stage production of "American Splendor", and Harvey chuckles through a performance featuring Donal Logue ("The Tao of Steve") as himself, and Molly Shannon ("Saturday Night Live") as Joyce.
An occupational hazard of a movie about a boring, ordinary guy is that there are going to be boring patches. Drawn on a page, the material lets the reader make the pace; metamorphosed into the relative real-time presence of the screen, it sometimes has trouble keeping the attention engaged. But it's a small and forgivable price to pay for the originality that this movie serves.
The story begins on Halloween of 1956, with little Harvey trick-or-treating with neighborhood kids dressed as superheroes. Harvey is dressed as himself, and he doesn't get any candy. He stalks off down the street muttering, and twenty years later he's still muttering, but as it turns out, sticking with his own identity does get him the candy in the end.
More on 'American Splendor'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
