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It is likely that you will sit down to watch
American Splendor knowing next to nothing about
the person whose life it celebrates: Harvey Pekar.
I had only a sketchy idea. But even if you are already acquainted
with him from appearances on Late Night with
David Letterman or from his unusual comic book American
Splendor, you are in for a revealing and
surprising journey. The film's varied portraits —
in cartoon, in
dramatic re-enactments, and in brief dalliances with the “real” Harvey Pekar
— add up to one of this year’s funniest and most profound films.
Jacques Derrida would have a field day reviewing
American Splendor. He argues that a biography gives readers a better
picture of the biographer than the subject. After all, we have to take
what the biographer is telling us on faith. The book (or the film) is
itself a construct based on the biographer’s impressions, assumptions,
misconceptions, and interpretations of his subject.
And as we read it, we make our own assumptions, our own
guesswork, our own interpretations of the words we are given. We might
end up light years from the truth about the subject, our impressions
corrupted like a message in the game of “telephone.” In the case of
American Splendor, we are several times removed from the “real” Mr.
Pekar, because we are interpreting a film assembled by a biographer… but
the biographer has written the script based on comic books that Mr.
Pekar wrote about his own life… comics that were illustrated by
someone else. Is this movie really about Harvey Pekar? You decide.
Here are the facts: Writers/directors Shari
Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini drew inspiration from the
autobiographical comics of Harvey Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner.
Their film was produced by Ted Hope.
The story takes place in Cleveland, where we meet
Pekar in top form, walking along and ranting
about his life. He’s a middle-aged, slouching Oscar the Grouch whose
trash can is his lousy job as a V.A. hospital file clerk. In his spare
time, he waxes philosophical and pessimistic with his acquaintances,
expounding upon his miserable fate, the torments of commercial culture
and capitalism, and his maddening quest to find a woman. After his
second wife storms out of his life, Pekar plunges into despair, finding
momentary distraction in his hobbies: comic books and jazz.
Soon he meets Robert
Crumb — yes, the Robert Crumb, the gleefully perverse comic book
artist — and becomes his friend before Crumb hits the big time. Their
friendship lasts, and eventually Pekar hands his first, feeble,
stick-figure-populated cartoons to his pal and hero. Crumb is
impressed, not by the drawings, but by the dialogue
and the concept: a comic about ordinary people with ordinary problems.
He becomes Pekar’s artist, and the comic book American
Splendor is born. It develops a cult following. One of Pekar’s fans,
a comic store manager from Delware named Joyce Brabner, writes to him
admiringly, and soon the two are married. Like a
badger and a mole, Harvey and Joyce are as strange and sullen a
couple the big screen has never seen.
Pekar goes on to fame by way of the David
Letterman show, in which the grinning talk show host ignores Pekar’s
sales pitch for his comics.
Letterman instead exploits the grumpy grizzled guest for laughs.
Humiliated, and yet continually drawn back to
the spotlight like the proverbial moth to its flame, Pekar becomes
increasingly frustrated at this strange marriage of fame, poverty, and
depression. It gets worse... and better.
He stumbles into a nightmare (cancer) and a
blessing (fatherhood.) The latter comes as quite an unlikely surprise;
Pekar’s vasectomy is just one many wrinkles in his history that he
openly discusses.
How does it all turn out? See the movie.
It’s a wild story, at times hard to believe. And it
is made even more compelling by the filmmakers’ gear-shifts between
storytelling methods. We first meet Pekar as a cartoon character,
right off the pages of his own comic. Then we meet him again
through a brilliant comedic performance by Paul Giamatti, who has
finally found a movie that gives him enough room to
demonstrate his wide range of talents. Lastly we meet the
real Mr. Pekar, sitting at a microphone in a sparsely furnished studio
narrating the movie, reading from a script someone else wrote. We also
get that old Letterman footage.
What makes this work so well is that Giamatti,
working with a brilliantly disguised Hope Davis as Joyce, delivers a
hilarious, commanding performance as the hunched and snarling Pekar. The
costumes, dialogue, the apartment and environment are all convincingly
drab, rough-edged, and disordered. If Mike Leigh had grown up in
Cleveland and hung around at garage sales reading
comic books, he could have made this film, and Giamatti possesses
a certain puffy exasperation brings to mind Leigh’s favorite actor,
Timothy Spall. Whenever things switch over suddenly to the real Pekar,
it is continually startling, much the way director Andre Gregory
surprised us by stepping into scene-shifts during Vanya on 42nd
Street. Pekar and Giamatti do not look much alike, but the actor has
nailed the mannerisms, the wild-eyed sarcasm, the wheezing
laryngitis-afflicted voice, the attitude.
Clearly, we are getting an interpretation, a
summary, some of which has been altered to make for a smoother film.
Thus, some episodes get only “sketchy” treatment. The Letterman chapters
seem a bit rushed. The cancer story could have been its own movie; here,
it feels like a necessary dramatic crescendo, a final obstacle for Pekar
that will either crush him or be conquered. But that was probably the
best option. After all, good biographers find drama in what really
happened (bad ones drastically revise reality and
make manipulative falsities like A Beautiful Mind.) We
have seen a hundred cancer stories on the screen. What makes this one
unique is not its exploration of the disease and its symptoms; the film
hardly bothers to note such specifics. It stands out
for focusing on the character, not the cancer, and how the disease
brings his life into focus. We see, as he does, what marvelous things
have come into his life that were not there before. He has a wife
who, odd and cantankerous as she is, loves him. And he has gained more
besides.
Many filmmakers would have explored this territory
to communicate that life is chaos, meaningless, all the way to the
bitter end. Pekar’s closest cinematic relative is Charlie Kaufman’s
self-absorbed, self-loathing self-portrait in
Adaptation. But Berman and Pulcini’s portrait of Pekar is
primarily an affectionate one, finding nobility and heroism amidst the
unhygienic details. I walked out of the messy apartments and back alleys
of American Splendor strangely inspired and uplifted, where
Adaptation, for all of
its insight and irony, left
me feeling like I need a shower. Kaufman’s cynicism taints his
portrayals of himself and others in his life, but
Pekar’s cartoons observe human failings
without mocking them. They betray a deep affection for the
overlooked people of the world, and it overrides his constant
complaints.
Thus, the film becomes a
comedy instead of a ponderous tragedy. We laugh because we know there is
“more than this,” more than failure, more than flaws. We recognize that,
for all of his relentless denials, Pekar has grown. He has
been given the key… to joy, if not to happiness. His
sufferings do not go away, but the introduction and progression
of love in his life brings order, comfort, and strength.
Were he to find the courage to ask where such gifts
come from, he might yet discover the design of the Great Cartoonist. The
resonance he feels in seeing himself as a character comes from the fact
that he is a character in a larger drama. For the Christian
viewer, I would suspect there is even greater joy in the moment that
Joyce finds a child standing in her apartment, or in the moment that
Harvey puts his arms around his unlikely, unsought, undeserved family.
The Christian perspective interprets this as the gift of grace,
blessings for the undeserving, a category in which all of us are
included. For others, it will seem, unfortunately, like dumb luck.
But there is more than just the drama of grace at
work. There is also the revelation of life as a work of art. As the
filmmakers bring to life the efforts of this frustrated and depressed
man to illustrate his own existence, they give us the thrill of seeing
the rewards of artmaking. As Pekar develops an artistic sensibility, he
finds purpose and drama in the details of all the lives around him,
including his own. As we watch him translate his mundane existence into
comic book art, we discover right along with him that there is no such
thing as “mudane existence”, and that wonderful stories and compelling
characters are all around us, waiting to be noticed.
Whoever it was that said “The unexamined life is not worth
living” would come out of American Splendor with a knowing smile.
(Well, okay, it was Socrates, and who knows what he
would have thought of the film? But my point stands.) What the film proves to us is that meaning, beauty, drama, tragedy, and
comedy are there, as deep as you care to dig, in any routine.
Seemingly insignificant moments resonate with the
potential of epic drama. As Harvey washes dishes, sloppy and
disgruntled, the thought bubble over his cartoon representation thinks,
“Poor dishwashing has always been my Achilles heel.” See?
Jeffrey's Rating:
A-
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