AMERICAN SPLENDOR

Directed by Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini Starring Paul Giamatti & Hope Davis

Programme Notes

In a distant, more innocent time, there was a clear distinction between cinematic fact and fiction. Documentaries were considered serious and truthful, conduits for poetry and useful information. Feature films were commercial activities, purveyors of falsehood and fantasy. This we now know to be nonsense. Documentaries were never objective and, because of private or public sponsorship, rarely disinterested.

Fiction movies, on the other hand, even the most extreme melodramas and escapist tales, can contain enduring truths. During the Second World War and its aftermath, feature directors such as Ford, Capra and Wyler made documentaries, while documentarists such as Cavalcanti, Harry Watt and Louis de Rochemont (of March of Time fame) turned to feature movies.

Some later directors - Louis Malle and Michael Apted are notable examples - consciously switched between commercial features and what became known as cinéma vérité or cinéma direct, usually commissioned by TV.

Terms like 'semi-documentary', 'docudrama' and 'documentary reconstruction' deliberately blurred distinctions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, however, continues to offer separate Oscars for features and documentaries. This situation renders problematic any recognition of the mountaineering epic, Touching the Void.

American Splendor, a biopic of Harvey Pekar, a celebrated writer for comic books of the underground variety, is written and directed by documentarists Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who operate like confident guerrillas in some no-man's-land between fact and fiction. Now in his sixties, Pekar has spent his life in the rundown Midwest industrial town of Cleveland, Ohio, working until his recent retirement as a clerk at a Federal Department of Veteran Affairs hospital. He's a nondescript character from a Jewish working-class background, nprepossessing in appearance and dress, an obsessive collector of records and comic books, well read and articulate in a bar-room, corner-diner sort of way.
By a happy chance - and underpinned by his admiration of the naturalistic fiction of Theodore Dreiser's school - he started in the 1970s to write autobiographical comic strips that were drawn by Robert Crumb and other artists. His motto might well have been Thoreau's observation that 'the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation'.

His wry humour and unsentimental observation of his own humdrum life and that of those around him led to Pekar gaining a reputation as a 'blue-collar Mark Twain'. He became a cult figure through the rough-hewn comic with the ironic title American Splendor, and he appeared on nationally broad cast chat shows holding his own against a patronising David Letterman. But he didn't give up his day job or leave his small disorderly apartment in Cleveland.

The bizarre life of his friend Crumb became the subject of a 1994 documentary by Terry Zwigoff. But Berman and Pulcini have gone beyond this to make a multi-layered picture involving fictional recreation, newly shot documentary footage and animation, producing a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist as a troubled man.

For much of the time, the querulous Pekar is played by that excellent character actor Paul Giamatti, a specialist in losers, subservient sidekicks and sad sacks. And his third wife, Joyce Brabner, herself something of an oddball, is impersonated by Hope Davis. But commenting on the movie is the real Harvey Pekar, whom we also meet along with the real Joyce Brabner and a number of the fellow workers Pekar brings into his strip, most notably a strange Catholic fellow clerk called Toby Radloff.

Toby, who talks as if he's reading from the bottom line on an optician's chart, is so convinced of his position as a despised nonentity that he's prepared to drive 260 miles to see his favourite movie, Revenge of the Nerds. The real Harvey, Joyce and Radloff are sometimes seen in the same frame as the actors who play them, appearing on stylised, skeletal versions of the real sets or locations on which the fictionalised side of the film takes place. In addition, the directors draw on the different comic-strip representations of Harvey.

To make matters even more complicated, Joyce and Harvey fly out to Los Angeles to watch a pair of stage actors impersonate them in a play based on Harvey's comic strip. It's a curious hall-of-mirrors effect that gets almost hallucinatory when we see Giamatti as Harvey leave a network studio's green-room to appear live on the David Letterman show, while Hope Davis as Joyce watches the real Harvey on TV clips from the archives.

In this context, who is the real Harvey Pekar? Who could be more real than Paul Giamatti with his shrewd comic timing and professional body language? Could the 'real' Joyce and Harvey have played themselves with comparable conviction in the scenes where Harvey is diagnosed with cancer and helped by Joyce to confront his treatment by turning it into a comic book called Our Cancer Year? Just as we were beginning to get over Spike Jonze's Adaptation, which started our minds reeling early in 2003, American Splendor comes along to keep us puzzled about the nature of reality during the new year.

Philip French, The Observer, Jan 2004

It takes a special sort of grumpiness to address your wife and adopted infant daughter as "man", generally in the course of some shrill and ill-tempered complaint. That's the sort of guy you're dealing with in this movie: a neurotic, jazz-loving, existentially anxious serial divorcee, now involved with a nerdy, nervy woman with big hair and glasses: a sort of defiantly uncool Woody Allen. This sweetly sad and deeply enjoyable movie is a drama-documentary collage based on the true life story of Harvey Pekar. He's a fat, balding everyman with poor hygiene who worked a grindingly dull job all his life as a file clerk at the local hospital, but who achieved cult fame through his self-published autobiographical comic-book American Splendor, which relentlessly documents the ghastly realities of Pekar's day-to-day life.

Pekar is played partly by himself, interviewed in a stylised all-white studio as he records the movie's voiceovers and answers personal questions with the wary, genial dismissiveness into which his natural bad grace has evidently softened over the years. He is also played in the dramatised chapters of his life by that undisputed king of American indie ordinariness: Paul Giamatti, whose terrible combover, slightly bulging eyes and thin resentful mouth make him the go-to guy for this kind of role.

Harvey Pekar's a real loser. His apartment's a mess and his wives keep on leaving him. "This plebeian lifestyle isn't working for me!" announces one in a mini-flashback, with a very Woody-ish imagined disdain. All Pekar has to live for are his comics and old 78 jazz records, which he collects with obsessive-compulsive fanaticism.

But it's this that brings him the most extraordinary piece of good luck, for which it seems to me neither the real nor the fictional Pekar in this film is sufficiently grateful. Pekar befriended comic-artist genius Robert Crumb, who was amused by Pekar's sweatily desperate life and generously agreed to illustrate comic ideas that Pekar would sketch out for him in crude matchstick-men prototypes. In Terry Zwigoff's documentary, Crumb often appeared to be one of life's victims, but compared to Pekar he looks like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Without the priceless Crumb and the artists that followed, Pekar would hardly be the cult success he became. Fame arrived, though not fortune; Pekar appeared on the David Letterman show, and found a devoted new wife in Joyce, played by Hope Davis - who was Jack Nicholson's daughter in About Schmidt.

Through the comics, and this movie's playful approximation of the comics' graphic styles, Pekar becomes a cranky, post-modern Pooter. His very ordinariness and those of his co-workers are transformed into a daily drama - a forerunner of that famous TV show about nothing, Seinfeld. "Another semi-bummer weekend..." mutters Pekar, slouching back to work in a comic-book frame. "There's an art to choosing which supermarket line to get into..." he ponders, eyes narrowing shrewdly, the thought crystallising into a bubble over his head. And in the kitchen, he soliloquises: "Poor dishwashing has always been my Achilles heel."

A little like CS Lewis, the curmudgeonly Pekar finds his life transformed by romantic involvement with a fan. Joyce runs a comic store in a faraway town and writes to her hero to ask for an extra copy of Splendor. They start corresponding, then calling each other on the phone and she worries about whether coming to see him might not be a bit of a shock. There are always "wavy-stinky lines" coming from his body in the comics, she explains nervously. "Those are motion lines," he replies.

When they meet, his opening line is to tell her he has had a vasectomy. After a terrible date, she tells him: "I think we should skip the whole courtship thing and just get married." It certainly ups the ante on Woody telling Annie they should kiss at the beginning of the date, so that they can relax and enjoy the rest of the evening.

American Splendor has, in its sarky and diffident way, some pretty serious things to say about the disaffected and the disenfranchised in American society, alienated from their jobs and their lives. When, in the 1980s, he, Joyce and their borderline-autistic friend Toby (Judah Friedlander) go to see the film Revenge of the Nerds, Pekar becomes livid at their tolerant approval for the movie's faux-affectionate treatments of the nerds and the illusory "victory". The function of "nerd" humour is to shower contempt on the blue-collar underclass and, anyway, these people aren't real nerds, he rages, just good-looking college kids in costume and makeup, characters who would in any case graduate to find good jobs. The real nerds are people like Pekar, who has experienced the unfunny bullying of the weak by the strong, and he comes to suspect that this is being perpetuated in a new and subtly cruel way when he and his friends become celebrities among the cool-kid media aristocracy. Poor Toby is used as an ironic poster boy for MTV and Pekar chafes at being laughed at - not with - by David Letterman on network television.

Through all this, Pekar and June's marriage staggers onwards, refreshingly without illusions: even when Harvey develops cancer and June has the excellent idea of getting him to write a comic about it - My Cancer Year - which would enable him to manage the trauma. There are no thrilling declarations of love. They are just two prickly, tricky characters who are less unhappy together than they would be apart and there's something moving in their tough disinclination to romanticise their lives. This is an elegant movie, with compassion and wit and excellent performances from Giamatti and Davis.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, Jan 2 2004

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