Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor: Stick Figure Finds His Voice - Page 4

I have to say, however, that while American Splendor is entertaining, the subject has escaped the makers a bit. The key is in the Letterman appearances featuring the real Harvey Pekar. The movie honors Pekar by not going in for suspense: we aren't made to feel he's blowing his big chance by being so hostile, or to feel like he's won the lottery when his hostility pays off with an invitation to return to the show. But it also makes you aware that there's something in Pekar that the movie can't get at any other way than by showing the man himself.

Paul Giamatti does inspired work as the cartoon version of Pekar. With his fried-egg eyes and his schlumpy carriage, Giamatti looks as if he's got one of those individual-portion black clouds that depressed cartoon characters walk under. The moviemakers haven't brightened up Pekar's character or life and yet Giamatti rounds the contours, dampens Pekar's aggression. (He's recognizably Pekar, but he's also Charlie Brown.) It's surely the fullest performance ever given by an American cartoon character, but it doesn't have the resistance-to-capture that the real Pekar shows on Letterman. Giamatti as Pekar is more representation than man, which is a bit of a failure when naturalism is your ideal.

This is just to say that the movie doesn't go beyond the comic books, it merely animates them. Don't get me wrong, that's a lot. But the movie seems a little meandering, especially toward the end, and I'm certainly not someone who gets antsy when there isn't a gun battle every twenty minutes. Part of the problem is the introduction of Pekar's third wife Joyce Brabner, played by Hope Davis. Davis always has an air of defensiveness and is a bit remote--sometimes she looks like a burrowing rodent just come up into the sunlight for the first time this season. Her role as Joyce uses this quality better than any other movie has. Joyce has as many peculiarities as Pekar, maybe more, but luckily for her she's combative enough to avoid being drawn entirely into his story. This means that she gets depressed until she comes up with projects of her own, which involve getting children in her life.

The movie mostly resists the impulse to present the Pekars' story as a journey to wholeness (it gets soft, understandably, only when it introduces the child for whom they serve as guardians), but there's another, subtler, problem. The movie never gets "behind" Harvey Pekar. It dramatizes his view of life and even more his view of what comic book narratives should be. It does much less with the semi-fictional Joyce--she is just a character in Pekar's comic book (a perception the actual Joyce seems less than enchanted with in her documentary-interview appearance in the movie).

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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