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The new movie American Splendor is a strange amalgamation of genres. It's a standard bio-pic, tracing the adult life of Harvey Pekar from his dismal days as a filing clerk to his somewhat less dismal days as filing clerk/underground comic book writer. It's also a history of American Splendor, the comic book series Pekar has been writing since 1976. And it's a post-modern exploration of how we project and record an identity in an artistic and commercial world. Though the movie's been getting rave reviews
from other critics, it is not entirely a success.

The film opens with a hilarious sequence of a young Harvey and his friends on Halloween. Each of his four companions has dressed up as a comic-book hero: Batman, Robin, Superman, and the Green Lantern. And each one is given a piece of candy from an enthusiastic woman. But when she gets to Harvey, who isn't dressed in a costume, she asks, "So who are you?" When he responds with his name, she replies, "Harvey Pekar? That doesn't sound like a superhero to me." It's a great line and a wonderful introduction to the film--touching on its themes of superhero comics vs. underground comics, regular guys vs. superheroes, and the difficulty of overcoming how other people define you.

Pekar had wanted to write an adult comic book about a regular guy and his regular life. As Pekar says in a voice-over, "ordinary life is pretty complex stuff." He couldn't draw more than a stick figure, however. But he happened to meet Bob Crumb, the (in)famous underground comic, who volunteered to draw the stories Harvey wrote. Crumb's work gave Pekar instant credibility. From those early days, Pekar has collaborated with many of the underground scene's best-known artists. His story has been himself, drawn from his own observations about life and the people around him.

The movie does a wonderful job of bringing those comic book stories to life. Often, the film dissolves from a regular shot into the comic book drawing, and vice-versa. The effect is to make you want to run out and buy the comic. Especially in the first half of the film, we get a great sense of why American Splendor has endured for so long. Pekar is right--ordinary life and its troubles and foibles can be both compelling and funny. And Pekar's deadpan humor, especially about himself, is exceedingly funny.

I also enjoyed how the movie interrogates the notion of a bio-pic; how can we really get to know a person in a couple hours? American Splendor (the comic book) does something similar. Because different artists have worked across the series, Pekar himself has been drawn quite differently from book to book. That leads to a funny scene when Pekar and a woman named Joyce (Hope Davis) strike up a relationship through the mail. She wonders which version of him is closest to what he looks like. This deconstruction of the bio-pic goes even further when we explore the notion of autobiography. American Splendor (the comic book) was completely autobiographical. The movie, however, has a script written by the directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. In an early shot, we see the real Harvey Pekar being given instructions on how to read his narration, a voice-over that the audience would assume he wrote but didn't.

This culminates in my favorite scene in the film when the camera pulls back on a brilliantly white room. There we see the real Harvey Pekar with his real-life co-worker Toby Radloff, and off to the side watching are Paul Giamatti and Juda Friedlander, who are playing them in the movie. The set is constructed like the backstage of a movie set, and the real Harvey and Toby are picking at the sweets laid out for the cast and crew. They're discussing loneliness, a common emotion for both, and their dialogue is wonderfully poignant. The whole shot is designed to make us think we're eavesdropping on a "real" conversation, but then we realize that this is probably scripted as well. This plays with the questions of what is real? what is authentic? and where is the intersection of biography, fiction, and "true" identity?

So if the movie is raising so many issues in such an entertaining way, where does it fall short? Actually, the better question is *when* does it fall short? That would be when Joyce enters Harvey's life. Though Hope Davis is a fine actress and one I'm always happy to see (ditto on Giamatti, who's quite good here in a rare leading role), her character's presence sends the film in an unfortunate direction. The movie becomes much more about their relationship and Harvey's struggle to make a name for himself. It's standard bio-pic stuff, following the traditional narrative arc of ups, downs, self-realization, and eventual triumph. That the triumph is the making of this movie puts a different gloss on the genre, but it's still as predictable as a "Making the Music" episode on VH1. The final sequence is particularly awkward, as a documentary-like camera zooms in on Harvey's real-life retirement party. It's saccharine sweet in a way the rest of the film avoids, and it strikes an ironically false note.

Still, there's much to enjoy in American Splendor, and I'm always happy to recommend a movie that dwells on the life of regular people. Sometimes I just get tired of superheroes. 

J. Robert Parks 8/14/2003

After decades of movies that have defined the way we classify films, it’s exciting to see something like American Splendor come along that finds itself stuck without a particular genre due to its originality. Part comedy, part drama, part documentary, the film drifts through many territories, but it uses all of these elements together in a way that works.

American Splendor covers the true story of Harvey Pekar (played by Paul Giamatti), a Cleveland file clerk who wrote a comic series about his own life, aptly titled American Splendor. So what we have in the movie American Splendor is a true story of a guy who is writing a constantly occurring true story of himself. To make things more interesting, American Splendor never lets us forget that it is a movie. We are reminded of this by recurring interviews with the real Harvey Pekar in the studio as he does the narration for the American Splendor movie himself.

Pekar’s life is not necessarily anything exciting, but it’s important that someone is making a comic book about real life. Pekar says in the film, “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.” That seems to be the overall point of American Splendor. While there may be no superheroes involved in Pekar’s world, it is constantly engaging and amusing because we know that this is what really happened and things like this happen in the lives of people every day.

There are other important characters in the world of Harvey Pekar. Joyce (played by Hope Davis) becomes Harvey’s new wife, struggling to understand him but ultimately wanting to stay by his side because she knows she won’t find anyone else. Toby (played by Judah Friedlander) is a slightly autistic co-worker who takes pride in the fact that he is the ultimate nerd. Harvey is bothered by the fact that Toby can find his identity in something so simple. Harvey himself has a difficult time realizing his identity. As an audience we have a difficult time discerning Harvey’s identity too. There is the Harvey in the movie, there is the real Harvey Pekar, and there are the various artists’ renditions of Harvey in the comic books.

Just as the comic book American Splendor is told in panels with captions, so is the American Splendor film. Comic book adaptations to film have been a big deal these days, but none capture the feel of a comic book as well as American Splendor. At several points in the film live action is combined with drawings from the comic books as we see how it all interrelates and are ultimately reminded that this is all the same story whether in still frames or in moving images.

For a film about ordinary life, American Splendor feels like something much bigger and more important. There’s a reason for this. For the people working jobs they hate, trying to find their identity in this harsh world, sometimes it helps to sensationalize life and pull some meaning out. At least American Splendor proves that this theory works as far as movies are concerned. 

Trae Cadenhead 10/8/2003