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American Splendor

I don?t know much about comic books, especially the well-drawn detailed kind for adult audiences. I?m more the type for Calvin and Hobbes or Far Side. Those comprehensively scripted plot-driven books have never been my forte, and I was skeptical when I first read the description of American Splendor, a movie that is about a guy who wrote just one of those comics. The comic was a hit in its day; this lowly comic book writer had appeared numerous times with David Letterman. The artist of many of his stories, R. Crumb, is someone that even I, the comic book ignoramus, have heard of. The story is a rags-to-riches-type of scenario that should inspire any creative-minded individual. Still, I only went because someone else offered to pay for my ticket.

It turns out, however, that this movie isn?t really about comics at all. Not really. Yes, our guy, one hapless Harvey Pekar with a moody demeanor, a dead-end clerk with a perpetual slouch, draws comics. Those comics, from which the movie draws its title, make it big and catapult him into a certain type of limelight. But the thing is, at the end of it, he is still, as he has always been, the slouching, grumbling, stumbling Harvey Pekar and it is clear we are supposed to love him for it. And we do. It is not a story about comics as much as it is a story about a guy doing what he can to live a life in the isolating, stultifying confines of modern urban America. And it is not as much a rags-to-riches scenario as it is a "rags are just rags, but that?s not necessarily bad" story. Harvey Pekar was the same old Harvey Pekar, with the messy apartment and the gloomy attitude, even after being famous enough, audacious enough, and un-self-conscious enough to cuss out Dave Letterman on TV. The movie isn?t so much an inspiration to the creative-minded as it is an entreaty to self-acceptance.

The movie opens with a gloomy Harvey at the end of his second marriage, walking glumly back and forth between his dumpy apartment and his desk job, tucked in the midst of file stacks at a hospital. He is your everyman, your any man, but an unwittingly funny one. "It?s cancer," says Harvey to the doctor who has just looked into his throat in search of the cause of his laryngitis. "It?s cancer, isn?t it? Oh God." The doctor calmly informs him it is a nodule on his vocal chord from so much yelling, presumably at the on-the-way-out wife. In this moment, as in many others in the film, Harvey is comically pathetic, sitting on the doctor?s bench in his undershirt and boxers, staring dismayed into the camera. Indeed, throughout the movie, directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini challenge us to laugh at Harvey, to ridicule his patheticness, and make this soon-to-be comic character into a comic figure.

Frustrated by his dumb job and saddened by his loneliness, Harry decides to do something, and sits down one day to write the first scenario of what would be a long chain of comic stories. He writes about waiting in a check-out line behind an old Jewish lady, as he had been doing earlier that day. This, improbably, makes a good story, a funny story that people can relate to. "This is . . . good," says his friend Bob Crumb, the comic artist. "Can I take them home and illustrate them for you?" And so is born Harvey the fictional character, who lives the same life as Harvey the real person, does the same mundane tasks, talks to the same unusual people at his hospital job. Harvey?s life becomes art. And after awhile it is hard to tell the two apart. As soon as his third wife stumbles into his life, a fan who comes to visit and stays forever, a black-and-white version of her stumbles onto the pages of American Splendor.

The film does a seamless job of portraying this paralleling in motion picture format. Harvey the real man walks in and out of comic frames. Pen-drawn characters appear momentarily in a scene for effect. Thought bubbles appear and disappear over peoples? heads. And best of all, the real people that were the inspiration for the drawings of themselves are in the movie too, as is the real-life Harvey Pekar. They all hang out on a strangely blank set strewn with objects, a fascinating tableau like a living comic frame. They are interviewed, but we also see them interact with each other, just as we see the actors playing them in yet another layer of their reproduced reality interacting. There is not, however, the sense of a documentary, where the person being interviewed in effect narrates the action played by the actors. In this docu-fiction incarnation, the various layers of reality interweave in such a way that they build on each other and create a whole, comprehensible and sympathetic portrait of somebody?s real and complex yet mundane life.

The actors are superb, especially Paul Giamatti as Harvey and Hope Davis as his wife Joyce. Their performances render comic moments with an honesty that makes you like and accept them instead of laugh at them. Harvey and Hope?s strange and impromptu relationship blossoms into a fraught kind of love which carries them along together through thick and thin and finally into this very movie. "I thought I was marrying someone funny," the real Joyce says to the real Harvey as they sit together at a table on the stark set. "Well, I fooled you," he replies, smiling sardonically. Like the movie, it is a moment as poignant as it is amusing.