Duncan Shepherd on American Splendor

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Think Negative
The flouting of the fictional illusion has been honestly come by.
Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published August 28, 2003
American Splendor, and And Now Ladies and Gentlemen
Rather too much has been made of American Splendor, although a fair amount could be made of it legitimately. Making too much is just the American Way. It is not the American Splendor way. Suggested posture: the slouch; gesture: the shrug. At the very least the film makes do as a chewable bone thrown to the famished fans of Ghost World, with a protagonist closely related to the latter's Steve Buscemi in his marginal existence, his menial job, his obliviousness or out-and-out resistance to fashion, his patronage of yard sales, his esoteric record collection, his affinity for comics, his congenital negativity.
One difference, of course, is that the present protagonist is an actual living person, one Harvey Pekar, a 365-days-a-year sourpuss, sorehead, and bellyacher ("I don't know how to be positive"), and a lifelong file clerk at a V.A. hospital in Cleveland, who eventually became the protagonist of a series of autobiographical underground comics also titled American Splendor (illustrated by various hands, starting with R. Crumb), and who by that avenue became the sometime foil of David Letterman and the full-time husband of one Joyce Brabner, a "self-diagnosed anemic" and all-around hypochondriac, who began as a fan of the comics and wound up as a character in them and a collaborator on them. Another difference from the Buscemi character is that this one, center-stage the entire time, must carry the whole load by himself. And even though Paul Giamatti, the very epitome of a supporting player, relishes his chance at a lead, he's a bit of a one-note, a bit of a stickler about always staying "in character." The danger of him thus seeming to be putting on an act is that he seems to be insinuating that Pekar too is putting on an act. Our respect for the man teeters in the balance.
In covering the complete biographical arc at one sitting, the film inevitably deviates from the amorphous daily minutiae in which the comic books (so I gather) wallow. It comes to resemble instead a conventional American success story -- however modest or ironic or parodistic a one -- with a suspiciously rosy ending after a climactic battle against cancer. The tastiest chewing on this bone remains the minutiae: the calculated risk, for instance, of getting into the shorter checkout line at the market when the customer ahead of you is a Jewish granny who can be counted on to haggle; or the unfortunate timing of the nodule on our hero's vocal cords, coinciding with his first wife's walkout and reducing his heartfelt plea to a feeble squeak. This, and much else, is very funny stuff. Well, pretty funny stuff. Hmph.
The infiltration of the action with other likenesses of the hero -- the real Harvey Pekar behind the scenes and in voice-over, the real Pekar in archival clips from the Letterman show (major exception: his ill-tempered meltdown on the air must be re-enacted by Giamatti and a silhouetted stand-in for Letterman), along with assorted comic-book incarnations of Pekar -- feels not so much artistically bold and daring and liberated as artistically casual, capricious, slovenly. Maybe, in smaller concentrations, there's something bold and daring and liberated inherent in those very qualities, and they certainly suit the protagonist. In any event, the technique seems well justified -- Giamatti, after all, can be seen as just another "artistic" rendering of the real person, a live-action, three-dimensional supplement to the comic-book versions -- and it even provides a kind of corroboration: you might think that the bespectacled robot-voiced nerd at the V.A. was laying it on a little thick until you encounter the actual man in the flesh.
This flouting of the fictional illusion has been honestly come by. The married team of co-writers and codirectors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, started out as documentarians, just as did the director of Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff, whose best-known documentary, just to tighten up the connection to American Splendor, happened to be a portrait of R. Crumb. These two films travel in intersecting circles. But perhaps the strongest connection between them, and my strongest feeling about both of them overall, has to do with how approachable, how touchable, their people seemed, for all their prickly eccentricity, and how many areas of existence are still unapproached and untouched on screen. With whom would you rather sit down over a cup of tea and talk about the state of the world -- Harvey Pekar or Neo? Joyce Brabner or Lara Croft?

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Topic - Duncan Shepherd on American Splendor - clarkjohnsen 10:23:29 08/27/03 (0)

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