directors/screenwriters
Shari Springer Berman
Robert Pulcini
based on
the comic book series by
Harvey
Pekar
and the
book Our Cancer Year by
Harvey
Pekar
Joyce Brabner
producer
Ted Hope
cinematographer
Terry Stacey
music
Mark Suozzo
editor
Robert Pulcini
cast
Paul Giamatti (Harvey Pekar)
Harvey Pekar (Real Harvey)
Hope Davis (Joyce Brabner)
Joyce Brabner (Real Joyce)
Earl Billings (Mr. Boats)
James Urbaniak (Robert Crumb)
Judah Friedlander (Toby Radloff)
Toby Radloff (Real Toby)
Donal Logue (Stage Actor Harvey)
Molly Shannon (Stage Actor Joyce)
Madylin Sweeten (Danielle)
Danielle Batone (Real Danielle)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 101m
u.s.
release: 8/15/03
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
harvey
pekar's website
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Those of us who've been reading
American Splendor for the past few decades (I've been
a fan for about fifteen years) may consider Harvey Pekar a friend
even if we've never met him. Pekar, who until recent years was
a file clerk at a Cleveland VA hospital (he's retired now), wrote
the autobiographical American Splendor comic book as an
alternative to the unrealistic, power-fantasy domination of superhero
comics; the artists who have given form to his stories over the
years range from the underground-comix godhead R. Crumb (a friend
of Pekar's from way back) to relative whippersnappers like Alison
Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For) and Chester Brown (I
Never Liked You).
Pekar's style is usually anecdotal
-- he's like a street-corner stand-up comedian regaling you about
this nutty guy he knows or this weird shit that happened to him.
He makes entire stories out of losing his glasses or making lemonade.
He also, with the help of wife Joyce Brabner and artist Frank
Stack, turned his early-'90s ordeal with cancer (not his last
bout with it, sadly) into the spiky, unflattering, and almost
unbearably real graphic novel Our Cancer Year. Pekar had
turned his laser-like focus on mundane, everyday events for so
long that when he used the same technique on the daily grind
of chemo and sweating out test results, the result was devastating.
The movie American Splendor
limits Pekar's cancer to the last act or so, and sweeps through
it mainly in a montage of panels drawn from Our Cancer Year.
In effect, the graphic novel is literally adapted to film
-- there it is, Pekar's words and Frank Stack's art, right there
on the screen. American Splendor is a highly unconventional
movie that, given its source material, could hardly have been
told any other way. There have been so many different Harveys
over the years, as depicted by myriad cartoonists and even portrayed
in stage adaptations of the comic, that it makes sense for the
movie to offer us at least four more Harveys. There's the real
Harvey, filmed as he records his narration for the film, and
seeming pragmatically disinterested in the script. There's a
version of Harvey as a boy, in a brilliant device (little Harvey
on Halloween, dressed as himself, trick-or-treating alongside
various kids dressed as superheroes) that establishes his stubborn
resistance to doing whatever everyone else is doing to get the
goodies. There's a scene re-enacting one of the stage productions
of American Splendor, with Donal Logue and Molly Shannon
amusingly miscast as Harvey and Joyce. And in the audience watching
this stage adaptation is Paul Giamatti, who plays the "movie"
version of Harvey.
It works like a charm. The
movie is as unclassifiable as the comic -- neither documentary
nor biopic, or maybe both; in any case, its own ornery critter.
Giamatti-as-Harvey shleps from event to event, remaining the
same prickly persona whether interacting with nerdy coworker
Toby (Judah Friedlander) or with nerdy talk-show host David Letterman.
(Pekar and Andy Kaufman have more than just Letterman notoriety
in common, I've always thought.) Coming off of his third marriage,
which failed in part because of a vocal nodule that prevented
him from talking to his new wife, Harvey approaches a fourth
possibility -- comics fan and writer Joyce Brabner, played here
by Hope Davis in exactly the role that suits her odd, neurotic
rhythms best -- with equal parts hope and trepidation. He does
just about everything he can to deromanticize himself for Joyce
upon their first meeting; Joyce isn't into romance either, and
thus begins a union that will last for the better part of two
decades and counting.
Harvey and Joyce are not the
usual beautiful people falling in love beautifully. By movie
standards they are quite an unconventional couple; by the yardstick
of our own experience they're refreshingly credible. Hope Davis
enters the movie belatedly, bringing much-needed friction with
her; Giamatti plays various levels of exasperation off of her.
Their first kiss is an awkward disaster, and they pick and kvetch
at each other once they're married, but because of all this (not
despite it all) we believe in their love. An artist herself,
Joyce uses her creativity to help Harvey's writing career, such
as when she whips up a Harvey Pekar doll for Harvey to use as
a promo while appearing on Letterman. The movie doesn't really
have time to get into their shared politics -- "strident
leftist," as described by Harvey -- though it touches on
them a little.
Giamatti doesn't quite attempt
a Pekar impersonation (hilariously, Pekar's narration plays over
Giamatti slumping down the street: "He don't look anything
like me, but whatever"), which would have been disastrous
in a movie where we often see the real thing. He gets the pugnacious-intellectual
soul of Harvey as seen in the comics, as if he'd internalized
all the stories and carved everything off of himself that wasn't
Harvey. (A thinning hairpiece and a stooping walk is about all
he does physically to suggest Pekar, yet he looks entirely different
here than he has in any other role I've seen him in.) Most of
the movie is deadpan comedy, linking itself tonally with other
indie-comix films like Crumb
and Ghost World. But when
the narrative takes its turn towards cancer, Giamatti and Davis
have a nicely subdued moment on the steps outside the doctor's
office -- "Who'll take care of you if I'm gone?" he
nearly sobs -- and an equally fine moment when the phone rings
with good news and the mood is less exultant than just a quiet
sigh of relief.
Events are necessarily foreshortened
in the film -- this might've been even better as a 10-episode
cable series (HBO Films produced it) -- and the late-inning introduction
of Harvey and Joyce's adopted daughter Danielle feels a little
tacked on, if only because that story seems to demand
its own movie. Still, I can't imagine anyone not enjoying this
entertainingly fractured multi-portrait. After seeing the movie,
I went back and read some of the early issues of American
Splendor, in which the younger Harvey is alone and bitter
and afraid of dying alone and obscure. I had to smile, remembering
the final images of the movie, with Harvey beaming and surrounded
by family and friends, up there on the big screen. It's the one
part of the movie that isn't quite true to the hard-scrabble,
pessimistic, resigned-to-a-flunky-life tone of the comics, but
it has my full permission to do so.
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