American Splendor

People want previews. I don’t know why. All the movies are gonna suck anyway. MYSTIC RIVER–Finally it looks like The Man With No Name is going to make another great film. This one has won raves all over the place for being a return to form for Clint and I really hope it is.

It’s got something to do with three lifelong friends (Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon…amazing cast) who band together when one of their daughters is kidnapped, killed, raped…something along those lines. But are they really banding together? Or is one of them working against them?

As much as that sounds like not much of a premise to hang your hat on, the preview works REALLY well and, as I said, I hear it’s a truly great film. I can’t wait to see it.

SYLVIA–Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar. She has a bad relationship with her dream mate (Daniel Craig) and maybe is depressed? I didn’t get much out of the preview, but it looks like it could be good. I just kind of think that it’s very much a wake movie coming in the wake of The Hours. I’ll check it out on video.

Now let’s get back to the REAL movie. The one that everyone will actually be interested in. The one about Our Man.

Harvey Pekar (pronounce PEE-car…not pecker–played by Paul Giamatti) is a comic book character. But he’s also a man. But can he be both at the same time?

This is the dilemma of Harvey’s life. He writes a comic book about his own life. You see, back in the 70s he met a guy named Robert Crumb who took the comic book world by storm by writing stories about the streets and drawing in a frank, yet fantastical way. Harvey wanted to do the same, but he couldn’t draw. When he showed his ideas to Robert, though, things clicked. Soon American Splendor was being passed around to a few different artists to illustrate Harvey’s stories of real life. It’s not an extraordinary life by any means, but it’s real. Harvey has real problems (he’s had two divorces, his new wife Joyce (Hope Davis) loves him pretty unconditionally, but she won’t take his shit and gives it right back to him, he finds out he has cancer…you know, things that make us break down or keep us in line) and real concerns. He’s never saved a life and he’s never killed anyone. He just is.

That’s what makes him great, though. He just is. He is the only Harvey Pekar that he knows how to be. He’s an asshole. He has no social skills. He’s a total curmudgeon who sneers, pouts and typically puts himself first. He’s an everyman. We don’t necessarily like it, but we can all identify with Harvey a bit too much.

The performances in the film are all uniformly great. Giamatti is absolutely amazing as the central character. He takes what could have been sad and pathetic and puts a truthfulness into him that makes him completely sympathetic. We really WANT him to win!

Hope was also very good as his put upon wife who actually helps his situation and makes it worse all at the same time. She brings him out of his shell and makes him do things the he normally wouldn’t do, but she’s also lazy and does things spur of the moment that they can’t necessarily afford. She was much better than she’s been in years, actually. She’s been a little shrill lately, but I think she’s getting back on track. Good. I like her a lot.

Somehow the acting manages to outshine the style of the film, which plays with the form so much that you almost forget whether this is a narrative film or a documentary. The real participants of Harvey’s life show up throughout the film along with the real Harvey in interview segments that are shot on a white soundstage with a few props thrown around. There’s animation, combinations of animation and live-action and even combinations of doc and narrative. It’s one of the more innovative films of the year. I can’t wait to see what Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman do next. (Before this they did, among a few other docs, The Young And The Dead, a very good HBO doc about a famous cemetery in Hollywood.

But, all in all, it’s just a story of “everyone else.” The people who fell through the cracks of the American Dream. They’re not rich. They’re not poor. They’re just getting by and doing the best they can. It shows that comic books don’t have to be about super heroes. They can be about the weird guy next door who just lives his life. And it becomes everything that Harvey probably tried his best to avoid in his comics, but just couldn’t: it’s funny, touching, sad and life-affirming. He couldn’t avoid them because they were in him and they just are.

Now, pardon me while I have a strange interlude. I may repeat myself, but I think it bares repeating:

I’ve been reading some posts on IMDb about how disappointed some people were in this film. They wanted character arc. They wanted a completely sympathetic character that they could latch on to. They wanted more about the comic books.

Well, Harvey Pekar is a normal guy. Normal guys don’t really have character arcs. A lot of them live the same life that they started out living and never really change.

But Harvey actually did change. He actually became quite a bit more sympathetic as time went on. Yes, he was always bitter and scowling, but he smiled towards the end (it almost looked painful to him and was one of the best moments of the whole film) and you could tell that his life was getting better.

And for those of you who wanted more about the comics: this movie IS the comic. The comic is the movie. It’s hard to get more about the comics without making the whole movie animated. His reason for doing the comic was here along with every subject that he ever put in the books and how they came about. It’s his life. He wanted to do underground comics because he felt that he had something to say about normal, everyday, mundane life. And he did. It’s all here in vivid color for you to see.

I’ve never read the books. I may never read the books. I don’t know. But I do know that I have a lot of respect for Harvey and what he did. Not only what he did for comics, but what he did for the common man. He gave them a hero that they could believe in. This hero didn’t save lives. He just lived his own one day at a time. And that’s all any of us can really hope for.