August 15, 2003
By D.K. Holm
Comic Book Confidential
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
AMERICAN SPLENDOR begins innocently and bucolically enough.
A bunch of kids are trick or treating. One is costumed as Superman. Another is Batman. A third is dressed as Robin. The last one is in "civilian" clothes.
When queried by the lady of the house whose candy the lads are seeking, the non-costumed element of this group says with exasperation that he is not a super hero, but merely "Harvey Pekar." At which the nickname-prone kids in his clan cough into their hands, "Pecker." Pekar is in fact put out that the dispenser of candy should interrogate him. Indeed, he stalks off, bemoaning the stupidity of all humanity, and throws his sack of candy onto the ground.
There are several things wrong with this scene.
For one thing, the Pekar character is presented as if he were unaware of the rituals of Halloween. Is this conceivable? What kind of kid in America in the '50s did not know of this holiday? Okay, so maybe Pekar didn't know about it, never saw a horror film on TV, never went out before on the last day of October. The film does not convey that ignorance in a plausible manner. Plus, why would a kid hang out with a gang that takes the first opportunity to call him "Pecker"? And finally, what kid in the world would toss away a perfectly good sack of hard-earned candy, especially a character who, later in the film, is shown to be an eager consumer of "gourmet" jelly beans?
AMERICAN SPLENDOR is a film that, from its first seconds, puts forward an utterly unpleasant central character. And, with their heads hung low, the filmmakers seem to be aware of this. Indeed, the whole goal of the directors is to find something, anything good to say about their protagonist.
I feel them. I, too, have had interactions with Harvey Pekar. For a brief, glorious period of time in the early '90s I was the book review editor of a local weekly "alternative" newspaper. In that capacity, I read through many (though not that many) freelance submissions. One of them was a spec book review by Harvey Pekar. I thought to myself, Could this be the Harvey Pekar? After all, I was familiar with him through the many issues of AMERICAN SPLENDOR, illustrated by R. Crumb and others, that had already come out.
Well, it was. And the relationship, such as it was, could only end badly. My experience, as far as I can remember, was this: after printing a couple of Pekar's reviews, I was thereafter inundated with many more reviews, none of which I had asked for, or, in terms of the packages of book reviews I was assembling on a quarterly basis, I needed. When I tried to explain this carefully to Pekar in a letter, wherein I attempted to lay out the procedures that my particular newspaper could afford and accommodate, I was greeted with scorn (I have the letters somewhere, in the file folders where all my regrets and bad memories are stored). I was to learn from the owner of a local bookstore that, years later, when Pekar came to town to promote one of his books, that he was still railing about what a horrible person I was. I was surprised that he even remembered my name. Our interactions had amounted to maybe seven letters, maybe fewer. But I had "betrayed" him because I tried to tell him that our paper, with its limited space, preferred to assign reviews rather than accept whole-heartedly those passed over the transom.
I like to think that I am a naïve, befuddled sort of fellow (in many ways I am; in others, not). I was actually baffled at how I could have offended Pekar so quickly, so terminally. Now, thanks to AMERICAN SPLENDOR the movie, I acquired some insight into that situation of so long ago. It is about the only pleasure I got out of this film.
Pekar is an angry, dyspeptic grudge collector. There is no silver lining out of which he cannot subtract a dark cloud. He is a Woody Allen-style hypochondriac who actually came down with something. He is self-absorbed, irritable, and bombastic. In the movie, his real-life wife says it all. She came to Cleveland, she says, to marry a comic book artist she thought would be a funny companion, and instead got a manic-depressive. Boy, did she misread this guy's comics. Pekar is the most humorless comic book writer in the annals of the art form.
 |
AMERICAN SPLENDOR tells the self-aggrandizing story of an annoying Cleveland lad who grew up to be a clerk in a VA hospital. He had a collecting mania but also a lack of personal cleanliness skills (a contrary set of tendencies, in my experience). Nevertheless, as a comic book collector, then a jazz record collector, he eventually meets the similarly inclined R. Crumb, who moved to Cleveland in the early '60s and got a job at American's most famous card company. The good luck to have Crumb in his life eventually leads, 13 years later, to Crumb illustrating some of the stories that Pekar has written about his life as a drudge in a large institution and in a typical American town that crushes its denizens.
The film follows Pekar as he loses a wife, garners a certain measure of fame as a comic book creator, acquires another wife, appears on the David Letterman show, has his comics turned into a stage play, contracts cancer (which he manages to beat), allows his wife to adopt the daughter of one of his illustrators, and then has a movie made of his life, like his mentor/competitor Crumb. This would all be very interesting if it weren't so … boring.
I don't say this out of malice or any residual bitterness at Pekar for his bizarre and irrational behavior toward me, but he is a very boring writer. (If nothing else, the film made me 3 for the first time in my life — sympathize with David Letterman, who, during Pekar's television appearances, attempted futilely to calm down the out-of-control and self-destructive guest.)
I offer up as evidence of Pekar's shallowness the passage in the film in which Pekar, in the form of Paul Giamatti (a cross between Wallace Shawn and Woody Allen), steps forward to enact one of Pekar's cartoons about finding several other "Harvey Pekars" in the Cleveland telephone book. The banality of this sequence is astounding. It's an obvious moment. Everyone has done it. Yet Pekar, according to his testimony, never contacts any of the other Pekars, despite the uniqueness of the coincidence. He merely notes that it is odd that in a city as "small" as Cleveland that there should be so many Pekars. His philosophical ponderings culminate in the question, What does a name mean?
Shakespeare, this is not. For a guy, in the movie, who is presented as a non-stop reader of Dreiser, Elinor Wylie, and other masters of social realism and political comment, Pekar comes across as not very insightful about life itself. In attempting to convince Crumb that he should illustrate Pekar's scripts, Pekar says, "Ordinary life is pretty complex." But in his autobiographical cartoons he doesn't make it complex. He makes the incidents as banal as they must have been when he lived them. His Joycean epiphanies lead nowhere. Dostoevsky managed to find real existential drama in his underground man, who faced daily the anger of having to step out of the way of a burgher who marched dominantly and insentiently toward him every day on his way to work. Elvis Mitchell wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES that Pekar "may not be a genius, but he does have the soul of an artist." I am baffled as to where Mitchell found manifestations of this "soul." Anyone who needs immediate evidence of Pekar's banality as a writer can simply pick up the August 15 issue of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, which features a long-winded six-page comic book story written by Pekar about his life and its cinematic recreation. The sheer tedium and plodding mediocrity and braggadocio of the piece belie the enthusiasm with which the filmmakers have embrace Pekar as a subject. Pekar may well be the most overrated figure in contemporary comic books.
 |
The man may be a bore, but the movie about him has its limited charms. Blending enacted scenes and interviews with Pekar and his wife, the filmmakers, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, set the "real" Pekar against white, clean backgrounds before which he grouchily and impatiently answers questions while miscellaneous extras enact the colorless background color of his life. Giamatti seems to capture the unlikable surliness of Pekar, and the great James Urbaniak (HENRY FOOL) is a fair imitation of Crumb's vocal and sartorial style.
 |
 |
Unfortunately, Giamatti can't do a "file drop" take to save his life. This moment, which is designed to expose Harvey to a medical file of a deceased person not unlike himself, thus spurring him to existential action, is lame and telegraphed in the extreme. And I am baffled over the cult of Hope Davis, who plays Pekar's current wife. Davis almost always plays annoying and humorless scolds, be it in NEXT STOP WONDERLAND, THE DAYTRIPPERS, JOE GOULD'S SECRET, ARLINGTON ROAD, or ABOUT SCHMIDT. Naturally, since she always plays the same person, the nation's movie reviewers have anointed her the hope and future of American cinema. Her character is funny, though — Joyce is a female nerd with an abject sympathy for Pekar's nerd work friend, whose favorite movie, REVENGE OF THE NERDS, she finds to be a demand for equality equivalent to "the 'I have a Dream' speech." The idea of her character is funny. But then you have to endure Davis's pinch-mouthed, bossy, scolding enactment of it.
 |
Eventually, AMERICAN SPLENDOR becomes a medical drama, and descends into BRIAN'S SONG territory. That these medical events really happened does not make them any more dramatically interesting then they were in the sports TV movie, also based on true events. AMERICAN SPLENDOR is a fine, middle-brow celebration of a working class guy who made something of himself but who still isn't happy. That the film is so enamored of its supercilious central figure bespeaks a saintly patience on the part of its makers. I expect an acrimonious falling out between the filmmakers and their subject any day now.
NEXT TIME: BUFFALO SOLDIERS
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
