American
Splendor begins with the story of a down at heal guy whose life seems
to be going nowhere. He’s in a dead-end job as a filling clerk at the local
hospital, his apartment is a sty and his second wife is leaving him for
a better life elsewhere. It’s no surprise that things are starting to get
him down. Whilst he’s a pessimistic kind of guy with no great expectations
of life, he can’t seem to shake the sense of longing for something more.
Within him lurks the desire within us all to leave some sort of lasting
mark upon the world. This is the true story of the life of Harvey Pekar,
an ordinary guy from Cleveland, Ohio who finds a way to create something
poignant and poetic out of the dross and drudgery of his existence and
how his life changes (or doesn’t) as a result.
Through his acquaintance
with successful comic book artist Robert Crumb, Harvey develops the idea
to pen his own comic strip that document the mundane minutiae of everyday
American life – the agony of choosing the right supermarket queue to join
and the ramblings and observations of his offbeat friends and colleagues.
Appreciation for Harvey’s musings becomes widespread and he soon starts
to develop his own fan base. Most significantly for him is fellow oddball
Joyce Brabner, a comic book store owner in Delaware, whose store sells
out of copies of the comic and in desperation to obtain one for herself,
contacts Harvey directly. Harvey may have newfound wealth and success but
as always he’s feeling pretty dissatisfied and increasingly lonely to boot.
So once he’s managed to convince Joyce to come to Cleveland he greets her
at the station, in his brilliantly dogmatic fashion, with the announcement
that before things go any further she should know that he’s had a vasectomy.
Joyce is unperturbed by Harvey’s frankness and suggests later that same
night that they should get married.
The runaway success of
his work results in Harvey occupying a regular guest spot on the David
Letterman show and even his friends and colleagues wind up with television
cameos. The great thing about Harvey is that despite his apparent success
he never loses his gloomy attitude and for me this is the real joy of the
tale. He winds up disgracing himself on Letterman by ranting live on air
about the pointless triviality of the show and subsequently is never invited
back. His gift is capturing the humdrum side of life and he never loses
his perception for it, just as he continues to work as a filing clerk till
the day he retires. Harvey knows that despite the famous self-help book
that tells you to do otherwise– ‘sweating the small stuff’ is what life
is all about. Therein lies both the agony and ecstasy of everyday existence.
The film itself is shot
on several levels. With actors playing the parts of Harvey and his cohorts
including beautifully empathetic performances from Paul Giamatti as Harvey
and Hope Davis as Joyce. The real individuals also appear as themselves
on the set of the film and comment on and narrate the action. There is
actual footage of Pekar’s appearance on the Letterman show and some of
the story is portrayed through comic strip sketches. American Splendor
is a cleverly told, wonderfully humane story about the exquisite charm
within the tedium of daily life.
Nicola
Dewe
When
I think about comic books, which admittedly is not too often, I think only
of the superheroes of my youth: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green
Lantern, and The Flash. Yes there was the occasional Archie thrown in,
but comic books always seemed to be about heroic adventures that I could
use to escape from the drudgery of schoolwork. The American Splendor
comic books, however, ushered in a new era that focused on the events of
day to day life, attempting to extract meaning from "sweating the small
stuff". American Splendor, by Shari Berman and Robert Pulcini, chronicles
the life of underground comic-strip writer Harvey Pekar in a delightfully
innovative film that came away with the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. It
is part documentary and part drama and alternates between showing the real
Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner and the fictional couple played
by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis. It also shows cartoon versions of the
characters in animated sequences interacting with the flesh and blood heroes.
The real Harvey, who gave
his blessing to the film, was a file clerk in a Cleveland Hospital and,
in spite of the fame that resulted from the exposure on David Letterman
and the success of the comic books, was never able to quit his job until
his recent retirement. Pekar, as brilliantly played by Giamatti, is the
essential anti-hero, the curmudgeon who sees life in terms of burden rather
than possibility and doesn't hesitate to spread his negative attitude toward
anyone in close proximity. The film navigates between the levels of the
real and the dramatized so skillfully that you hardly notice, especially
effective in the sequences when Harvey appears on the David Letterman show
in the 80s. One scene that is particularly seamless when Giamatti's Harvey
leaves the green room, a nearby monitor displays a clip of the real Harvey
sitting down to talk to Dave.
After establishing a friendship
with fellow depressive, R. Crumb (James Urbaniak), Pekar, a college dropout
with a personality as ingratiating as moldy turnips, begins writing stories
for illustrators to turn into comic books. Pekar's comics have titles such
as 'An Argument At Work' and 'Standing Behind Old Jewish Ladies in Supermarket
Lines' and are based on his everyday experiences at work and at home. The
comics demand that he pay close attention to each moment and he has a good
deal of material readily available to him with friend and co-worker Toby
Ratliff (Judah Friedlander), a proud nerd who drives from Cleveland to
Toledo just to see Revenge of the Nerds.
As the American Splendor
comic books become more widely known and distributed, Harvey meets Joyce,
a worker in a Delaware comic shop and the two lonely people begin to find
solace together. When Harvey has to battle cancer, he does so with courage
and turns his experiences into a comic book called 'Our Cancer Year'. For
the Pekars, life takes on new meaning when they adopt a young girl who
has become attached to Joyce. While I enjoyed American Splendor,
ultimately, Harvey's constant complaining and victim-like stance on life
makes him difficult to relate to and ultimately appreciate. "I'm kinda
like a class-clown type of guy ... with all these shticks that I do," Pekar
says. While the shticks are amusing and Pekar is refreshingly honest, it
is not enough to justify elevating his "outsider act" to the level of Socrates.
Howard
Schumann
