Written and directed by husband and wife team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, "American Splendor" is a clever blend of comedic adaptation, documentary and animation that has garnered such accolades as the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Fipresci Award at Cannes -- and it is well-deserving of all the hype.
The film tells the story of Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti), a frustrated and uncouth file clerk turned comic book writer. Pekar is not the type of man one would expect to be the subject of a major motion picture. He is ugly. He is laughably socially inept. Though modern technology has yet to invent a device whereby a movie-watcher can smell what's going on in a movie, I would bet that if such a device existed, Pekar wouldn't smell that great, either. And yet "American Splendor," which is modeled after Pekar's autobiographical comic book series of the same name, takes him as its reluctant hero and is a damn fine film for it.
After being left by his second wife, who can no longer put up with him and his "plebian" lifestyle, Harvey befriends comic book artist Bob Crumb (James Urbaniak) while searching for old jazz records at a garage sale. The subsequent success of Crumb's work coupled with Pekar's boredom and failures inspire our protagonist to create his own comic, not centered around some glamorous superhero, but rather simply chronicling his own day-to-day frustrations and observations.
As Pekar's work becomes an underground success, the viewer is further exposed to the comic book's cast of characters: Harvey's quirky friends and co-workers. In fact, quirky is an understatement. These characters are brilliant in the way that only non-fiction characters can be. From Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis), the neurotic fan who agrees to marry Pekar after their first date, to Toby Radloff (Judah Friedlander), the self-proclaimed nerd who still lives with his grandmother, these characters are too bizarre to have been made up, even by the best of fiction writers, and they are brilliantly portrayed.
As Brabner, Davis (whose most recent work includes her acclaimed role as Jack Nicholson's daughter in 2002's "About Schmidt") is appropriately dorky and unstable, while Friedlander (who has many legitimate theatre credits, but may be best remembered for his role as "The Hug Guy" in the Dave Matthew's Band video for "Everyday") is frighteningly good as Toby, the über-geek. It is ultimately Giamatti's turn as Pekar, however, that makes the film the masterpiece that it is. While fully portraying the aging comic book artist as an oafish, graceless and sometimes unhinged man, Giamatti simultaneously manages to lend the character a touching humanity that makes Pekar's exploits all the more hilarious and poignant.
While Berman and Pulcini's previous credits include such acclaimed underground documentaries as 1997's "Off the Menu: The Last Days at Chasen's" and 2000's "The Young and the Dead" -- an offbeat documentary about Hollywood Cemetery, the questionable entrepreneurs who are attempting to turn it into some sort of sick enterprise, and the crazies who are trying to get in there -- "American Splendor" is undoubtedly their finest work to date. They deserve credit for the film's unique concept of a seemingly regular feature that is buttressed by documentary elements and animation reminiscent of the comic itself. Primarily a scripted film (and well-scripted, at that), "American Splendor" is narrated by the real Pekar himself and cleverly includes footage of and interviews with him and the real-life versions of the film's other characters. Watching these tidbits reveals not only Berman and Pulcini's talent as documentary filmmakers but also the extent to which the various actors' portrayals of these characters are shockingly accurate. Thus, this technique of genre-blending captures the attention of the viewer in a way that neither a traditional film nor a documentary could on its own.
Most importantly, "American Splendor" speaks of Berman and Pulcini's ability to make beautiful the lives of the ugly, to make the everyman a hero. True, Pekar doesn't save the world. He doesn't even get out of his dead end job. But he does manage to surmount his own loneliness, utter lack of sophistication and complete inability to draw anything but a stick figure in order to author a comic book that makes his life, and those of his friends and followers, a little less boring. Oh, and it makes for pretty great viewing, too.
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