American Splendor - Will the Real Harvey Pekar Please Stand Up?

my rating:

The motion picture industry is in the middle of a torrid affair with comics. For the most part that means superhero stuff like X2 or the occasional genre piece like Road to Perdition. But one of the distinctive "genres" of comics (barely touched on by other media) is "autobio"... which is like "autobiography" but without the gloss one would put on a book for the ages, more like an illustrated diary of everyday life. While Harvey Pekar didn't invent the idea of autobio comics, he was doing it pretty early on, before it became an identifiable genre, with his series American Splendor.

Pekar's series has now been adapted into a movie. Because the series has been all about his life, it'd be tempting to say that this is a movie about Harvey Pekar. But it really is more of an adaptation of his comics, because Pekar remains the storyteller. While not entirely faithful to the original comics (and what adaptation ever is?) the movie draws primarily from them, and is not an independent account of his life (like the movie Crumb, about Pekar's friend and erstwhile collaborator Robert Crumb).

In fact, while Paul Giamatti is playing the part of Harvey Pekar in the movie, the actual Harvey Pekar narrates, and appears on-screen from time to time. So does his wife Joyce Brabner (also played by Hope Davis) and a few other people in their lives. To compound the confusion, there's even a scene re-enacting the stage adaptation of American Splendor in which another pair of actors portray Joyce and Harvey, in a scene showed previously in the movie... and of course the comics.

This multiplicity of "Harveys" may sound like a gimmick, but in the context of the film it all works. Also, since Pekar isn't an artist, he's relied on various illustrators to provide the pictures for his comics, and each one has their own interpretation of him, Joyce, and so on. If his readers can reconcile this ongoing visual contradiction, his viewers should be able to as well. This also gives them the liberty to use the actual footage of Pekar's appearances on the David Letterman show (on which he was a frequent guest until the two had a verbal fight on the air)... though it was a bit odd seeing movie-Joyce watching real-Harvey on TV.

The film is deliberate in presenting itself as comics-turned-movie: the opening credits are done as a series of comics panels (some illustrated, some with movie scenes playing in them), the expected hand-lettered captions explaining time and place are superimposed on scenes, and there are a few parts where movie and comics elements are combined into a single scene. A few other comics-adapted-to-movies have use this kind of self-conscious reference to their origins (such as the Hulk film, or the 1960's Batman movie/TV show), but with American Splendor, which specifically deals with the back-and-forth influence of Pekar's life on his comics and vice versa, it actually makes sense.

Not surprisingly, the movie leaves out a lot from its source material (we're talking about a couple decades' worth of comics, including a graphic novel about just the year of Pekar's bout with cancer), and takes some liberties with the details of the tale. (I'm puzzled about how Frank Stack, the artist who illustrated Our Cancer Year, became "Fred".) If you've seen the movie and want to know more about this rather ordinary (in a very interesting way) family, I' encourage you to pick up the recent collection of American Splendor stories, the Our Cancer Year graphic novel, or the inevitable Our Movie Year, in which Pekar tells about his experiences while having his work adapted into a motion picture. But don't wait for the book. When/if this movie plays in your city, or appears on the shelves of your local video emporium, give it a look.