AMERICAN SPLENDOR review

The first time I heard about AMERICAN SPLENDOR the movie, I was in the lobby of the Westin Hotel in Manhattan. I was there to shoot a commercial for Apple with Errol Morris doing his docu-mojo on me on an all white stage. At the time, I had a tooth that had split in two and the pain was excruciating. I mean, total friggin ouch, add to that… I really had to take a pee.

That’s when Paul Giamatti came up to introduce himself, I didn’t recognize him at first… but was in pain and had to pee… I asked him to hold the thought, I had to go potty, and when I came out and he introduced himself, I asked what he was doing in New York and he said… “I’ve got a part in a little film called AMERICAN SPLENDOR.” I started geeking out at that point… you see, I have been reading AMERICAN SPLENDOR comics since I was a kid… My dad had no problems with me reading Underground Comix at an early age, and Harvey Pekar… well, he’s that real person in the Underground language of Crumb, Frank Stack, Joe Sacco and David Collier. To me, he was part of the 3rd Universe of Comics. D.C., Marvel and Underground… I know it wasn’t a united universe per se, but as a kid I considered it as such… Like Marvel, they were texturing their characters with human frailties and situations… except, the Underground Comix universe characters had sex, were even handed in the depiction of sex, violence and drug use. They trumpeted the strange and unusual. And I loved them. Paul had a couple of 8x10’s from the film with him as he’d just come from the set, and showed me them… Had to admit, in the photo he looked pretty much like Harvey Pekar to me. I thought it was cool, told him as much, and basically didn’t hear anything else….

Till, my Father’s birthday this year… On January 27th at Sundance, our reporter Memento Man reviewed the film, calling it a “Good” film, but not in the “Very Good” or “Excellent” categories… even though the film did win the Jury Prize at Sundance. His review was brief… and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a film I would dig. It sounded like it could be a film that was too experimental for its own good. Then Moriarty posted a review from Earwicker that had me scared that they had missed the boat. All the doubt went away when I read Vern’s review of AMERICAN SPLENDOR… suddenly here was someone speaking the same exact language regarding Underground Comix and with a daring sense of filmic adventure I have. Vern is the type of film goer that dares to see films that are challenging and really different. Having met him in Seattle and after talking with him, I realized that he was either the same sort of genius as me or the exact same type o’ ‘tard! Anyway… his review has had me dying triple time to see this movie since early June.

Mr. Beaks sat down to interview the principles for this film Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis and then… Harvey Pekar himself. Salt in the wound. The lazy bum Beaks didn’t even review the film, cuz… well apparently because he’s slowly poisoning Moriarty to take over his prime piece of real estate beneath Warner Bros.

SO… Monday comes along and I realize that AMERICAN SPLENDOR had opened in Austin with the all the fury of a hiccup in the local press it seemed, and being awake in daytime hours and not knowing what to do with myself besides seeing a movie… I grabbed Papa-san, and went to the GATEWAY THEATER to catch the first matinee of the day.

I thought the film was starting at 12:30pm, and we pull up at 12:13pm, I hobble my way in to buy automated tickets, and as Dad walks up… he says… “Shit, we’re late, the movie has started.” Turns out, the film was scheduled for 12:15… So we rush to the screen, and get in right as that Regal space rollercoaster deal dodges the last kernel of popcorn… having missed all the trailers and in a movie theater with 2 other people in the room. HOW DEPRESSING!

Of course, I can’t really gripe, I haven’t seen the film and AICN has only written 7 stories about AMERICAN SPLENDOR, with none of the reviews coming from a “principle reviewer” on the site. We had dropped the ball too.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR is absolutely brilliant. B-R-I-L-L-I-A-N-T!!!

In one film you have a look at not just the real life of Harvey Pekar, not only his Auto-Biography in comic form, but also the dramatization of his life via a third party… AND all three interact with one another. The format just screams coolness to itself without ever seeming like a gimmick or a trick… It just feels like a natural extension of the strange life of Harvey Pekar.

It’s a strange thing to be a critic that allows folks glimpses of your real life. Harvey Pekar is in life a File Clerk, a Jazz Critic and a Social Critic by way of analyzing his own existence. He’s a simple guy to most eyes, but the simple truth about every simple life is as complicated as any “famous life” out there, and the second you begin to document that ‘simple’ life for the world to look at… as soon as you cross the panel line and illustrate your own id, your own interior monologues and thoughts… as soon as you let your exhibitionist’s hair down and enough people begin to take notice… your simple life begins to become remarkable.

Harvey has been riding that remarkable life ever since, not that it is easy… his fighting with cancer, struggles with love, the tedium of life and the empty cup of fame… it’s a fascinating study in the realm of 20th & 21st Century 15 seconds of fame extending well beyond those Warhol-ian limits into a life of popular obscurity.

This film brilliantly takes Harvey’s rather extensive story at this point, and instead of trying to get to the truth behind the legends that Harvey has constructed out of pulp and lead, they are… well… what was it that Carleton Young said to Jimmy Stewart? Oh yeah, “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Not only do they print the legend, they add to it, unlike most personality “documentaries” this film which isn’t a documentary, or entirely a narrative, but a melding of the two, it becomes a Narrative that becomes part of the Document about the peculiar life of the rather wonderfully odd Harvey Pekar.

The film is funny as hell, affecting as hell, brilliant as hell and innovative as hell.

The performances in this film are among the very best I’ve seen this year and if Paul Giamatti doesn’t give Bill Murray a run for his money for that naked gold schmuck, then the whole thing is rotten and rigged… but we know that it is already.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR is truly a unique film, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a film that so deftly played with the Pop Art meets reality borders the way this one does, hell this movie even breaks the mythical fourth wall to talk to us directly, something that Harvey does in the comic quite often.

The drama and passion of the film comes into play in the crazed feelings of insecurity and loneliness that Harvey obsesses over… the feeling of being in a dead end in his life, beautifully brought to bare in that filing scene where he opens that one, unfortunate, obit file. There in black and white was the fear that was bubbling in him. A single middle-age man in a dead-end job with no real hope of ever “being a contender,” but at the same time always being kind of afraid of leaving the stability of that life. That life gives him a narrative flow… He has a reason to live, he’s got to go to work the next day to file papers in the Hospital. As sad as it sounds, that was his reason, his purpose and that purpose while feeling painfully inadequate was enough to give him a connection to the world. He understood the position of his cog. Not only that, he understood the machine and his fellow cogs.

When he begins to see people he knows becoming famous… making a mark, it forces him to examine the infamous question of… IS THIS ALL I AM?

A dangerous, yet integral question to any life. Hell, one I don’t think you ever cease asking yourself, if you wish to continue to better your position in life, but for Harvey… Divorced, no children, no prospects, no reason to ever be remembered… The question haunted him. His friend Robert Crumb made it through comics, why couldn’t he?

That’s all I’ll go into regarding his narrative, but suffice to say… it worked out, never to gigantic proportions, but it all comes back to that whole popular obscurity thing. To the people that know of ya, you’re famous as hell, but to the world at large… he’s still just a file clerk.

The “love story” of the film is wonderful, because if you’ve ever read Harvey’s book AMERICAN SPLENDOR, Joyce is portrayed more often than not as a shrewish entity of exquisite bitchiness, but as the “narrative story” begins to go there, we break out to the ‘reality’ of the real Joyce and Harvey talking about it. Joyce challenging Harvey’s depiction of the negativity as being the thing that Harvey feels is more marketable… “Misery loves company,” that sort of thing… In that brief, little jab… you’re reminded of the textures… the reality…

Take this Tom Cruise World War II R.A.F. story that’s got the entirety of England pissed off at Americans for once again claiming credit for the victory of the Battle over Britain… and imagine… imagine if for a second there in the narrative, you had Tom Cruise defeating the entire Nazi Luftwaffe, and sudden the screen goes white and you are looking at an old Vet of WWII to set the record straight in the middle of the fictionalized account.

It’s like a real life version of WALTER MITTY – only you get to see the author of his own “reality” according to the masses, and suddenly… here’s one of the characters that’s willing to challenge not only the depiction of their “character,” but also the motivations behind why it was ever depicted in that manner. A character in the film that grabs the frame and says.. “Don’t believe this bullshit!” essentially… that’s great!

AMERICAN SPLENDOR deserves to be seen, demands to be seen not just as some “comic adaptation” but as a significant work of art that comments on itself and the very reasoning behind telling stories and the story tellers behind the stories we read.

My plan is to see this film with another person at least once a week through it’s Austin run. BRILLIANT MOVIE!