AMERICAN SPLENDOR
by
Anne Gilbert

Harvey Pekar may be a terminal grouch, but he is a celebrated one. Somehow, his unflagging grumpiness and stooped, dejected posture found their niche, either through charisma or pure luck, and Harvey became an icon of the underground comic scene. And now, he's been immortalized in American Splendor, a biopic that is original and innovative enough that it might eclipse his earlier artistic achievements, and charming enough that it overcomes many of its own faults.

Pekar lives a very downtrodden existence in 1970s Cleveland, shuffling between his dead-end job as a file clerk in the VA hospital and his home, where his second wife left him and their "plebian" life together, and his inability to clean manifests itself in a clutter of jazz records, comic books, and dirty dishes that threatens to choke off the outside world. Harvey's road to salvation comes, incongruously, in the form of his sudden inspiration to write comic books. Accompanied by his own illustrations -- scratches that are barely recognizable as stick figures -- Pekar turns his prosaic existence into a biting, insightful comic that plays on his strengths in observing, often with rancor, often with great understanding, the world around him. Harvey's prototype is good enough to interest his friend Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak), already a successful comic artist in his own right, in illustrating the book. And thus, American Splendor is born, with Harvey as the writer and unlikely hero of his own comic book adventures, working with various artists on different issues, and cultivating a loyal underground following.

The film American Splendor follows this comic birth, with Paul Giamatti as Harvey, channeling both the real figure and the Harvey of the comic books: slouching, sardonic, and simultaneously perplexed and perceptive. The film chronicles what these offbeat comics brought to their unlikely creator. Though he never leaves Cleveland, or his job as a file clerk, Harvey enjoys a particularly offbeat brand of underground fame. It is through his comics that he meets and marries Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis), a neurotic hypochondriac as awkward and unsuited to dating as he is. Due to the success of the comic book, he is invited to be a guest on the David Letterman Show, but it's his own wit and banter that causes him to be invited back again and again. And through his burgeoning success, Harvey never seems to drop his malcontented, put-upon behavior. He is, however, treated to what can only be described as an overly pat, simplistic ending.

While the conclusion, depicting Harvey's successful battle with cancer, his resolution of his marital troubles with Joyce, and their success in chronicling the ordeal in a jointly authored book Our Cancer Year, is all based in fact, the film treats it as a means to a suddenly more sunny existence. In the final moments, this abruptly positive outlook is rather incongruous, given the rest of the narrative. It is also rather misleading, since Harvey otherwise clings to his sour outlook as if he had never been uplifted in his life.

The brilliance of the film is that this is not a linear tale, told as a straight fictionalized narrative of a life. Instead, the film interweaves the various incarnations of Harvey's world. Narrative scenes with actors portraying the major figures are interspersed with documentary-like interviews of the real Harvey Pekar, as well as animated drawings featuring the different embodiments of Harvey from the comic books, and dividing the screen into comic book frames. The film uses its aesthetic playfulness to blur the boundaries of its medium; it is not a documentary, with its infusion of Harvey's comic book incarnations onto the image, but it is hardly fiction, when the actor playing Harvey can walk off the set and take a seat behind the real Harvey Pekar, bickering with a friend at the food services table.

This refusal to identify as either fact or fiction is a deft strategy by the writer/directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, two documentarians helming their first feature. It is evident that Berman and Pulcini have a great deal of affection for their subject, and they use that to evoke Harvey's voice at every opportunity, infusing the film with the same uniquely abrasive charm that gave the comic books such a devoted following. The film's primary downfall, then, is that it does little to court those viewers who are not already enamored with the character and personality of Harvey Pekar. In truth, he is enough of a grouch that he would undoubtedly be a hard man to spend any time with whatsoever. It is rather to the film's credit that it manages to make Pekar a more endearing fictional personality than he probably is in reality; however, he is still only to be taken in small doses. Furthermore, given their apparent fondness for even the most aggravating aspects of the figure of Harvey Pekar, the filmmakers do very little to explain or excuse his behavior -- he is simply a pessimistic, misanthropic grump. There is little about the man on screen that would make him a figure worthy of such an original, playful film, but rather than questioning his attitude, the film instead simply accepts it, seeming instead to revel in his self-imposed downtrodden state. It would be peevish, however, to malign the character of Harvey Pekar, considering that it is his innovation and ingenuity that brought about such a pioneering comic book, and it is that same comic voice that inspired the genre-bending treat of American Splendor.

©2003 Anne Gilbert
CineScene