Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor: Stick Figure Finds His Voice - Page 5

This presents the same problem for Davis that it does in Alan Rudolph's Secret Lives of Dentists. In that movie, Campbell Scott as her husband suspects her of cheating but does not want to find out whether he's right. He's a slightly frightening control freak and when control doesn't accomplish what he wants he begins hallucinating a Doppelgänger, played by Denis Leary, who can express anger (which actually takes the husband to a new, more purely masculine, form of control, making him even scarier). It's bad enough for Scott that Leary gets to play all the recesses of his character and gets all the good lines. But it's worse for Davis that the script doesn't tell us any more about the wife than her husband glimpses
or guesses.

While you may often wonder what makes the willowy Davis so mopey, she is not a fascinating creature. She's not openly sensual enough for that. Neither is she a waif, at least, but then she lacks the man's-woman directness that makes Helen Hunt appealing. (Hunt is among the least girlish American movie stars ever; she makes even Cameron Diaz seem coy.) Davis is there and not there, but not in a way that makes audiences wonder where she might be instead. Because it doesn't develop the wife's side of the marriage, The Secret Lives of Dentists seems protracted by an hour; it would have made a wonderful short.

Joyce wouldn't have to be fascinating but she's in the movie too much not to have more dimensions. She needed either to be a cartoon or a woman. It would have given the movie depth to suggest what it is about her that Pekar can't reach or comprehend--what gave her that stony look of forbearance in the documentary footage. It's odd that a movie co-directed by a woman wouldn't have got past the comic-book-loving boys' view of girls as appendages. Davis is very good, but the assignment raises more expectations than it allows her to fulfill.

All that said, the experience of naturalism at an American movie is so rare that the movie almost feels like a cleansing. In that respect it couldn't be truer to Pekar's beliefs as a narrative artist. And though the setting is grungy and it may seem balky to a lot of people not to be prompted for movie-ish emotions, Berman and Pulcini also shape American Splendor enough that it's enjoyable right on the surface. Packaging observations isn't the only way to make them entertaining.

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 …

Visit Alan Dale's author page — Alan Dale's Blog