Splendid
Film adaptation of American Splendor captures all the beauty and pain and mortality in writer Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical stories
by Noel Murray
American Splendor
Dirs.: Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
R, 101 min.
Now showing at Regal Green Hills 16
Thirty years into his secondary career as a comic book writer (supplementing a lengthy run as a file clerk at a Cleveland, Ohio, V.A. hospital), Harvey Pekar has penned hundreds of stories, mostly about his own life, all under the rubric American Splendor. To convert that body of work into a comprehensible film, writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini begin with what they believe to be Pekar’s zero-point story: an anecdote about “our man” losing his second wife in the wake of an extended bout of laryngitis brought on by excessive yelling. I first read that story in an American Splendor anthology published in the late ’80s, and at the time I saw it as another in a series of Pekar’s sour, darkly fascinating illustrations of how personal progress can be stymied by happenstance. Berman and Pulcini recast it as a precipitating event—the moment when Pekar realized that he no longer wanted to go through life without a voice.
Berman and Pulcini’s film version of American Splendor is initially impressive for its stylistic freedom alone. The filmmakers combine staged episodes from Pekar’s life (enacted by Paul Giamatti as Pekar and Hope Davis as his third wife, Joyce Brabner), interviews with the actual Pekar, documentary footage from the subject’s past, and even a few animated interludes. The mix of styles is meant to reproduce the experience of reading Pekar’s comics, which have been drawn by a variety of artists with a variety of impressions on the man and his life.
But what keeps the loose structure from being more than a crowd-pleasing gimmick is the way the technique speaks to this primary idea of having a voice and controlling it. The images may vary, but the words remain Harvey Pekar’s. Because even though he has yet to become either rich or famous, Pekar has built up a modicum of notoriety since he self-published his first American Splendor comic in 1975; and because of the weird alchemy of public life and Pekar’s own penchant for autobiography, plenty of people think they know who he is and what he stands for—and plenty of those people are wrong.
The author’s biggest brush with fame came in the mid-’80s, when he began appearing fairly frequently as a guest on Late Night With David Letterman. The snarky Letterman was keen to have the irascible Pekar on as a kind of blue-collar sparring partner, until Pekar began to feel uncomfortable with his role as a mockable working-class slob, at which point the writer guided the interview segments toward the questionable practices of Letterman’s corporate bosses at NBC and General Electric. Pekar’s appearances on the show subsequently tailed off. The last time he appeared with Letterman was on CBS in the mid-’90s, in the wake of the acclaimed book-length story Our Cancer Year, about the changes in Pekar’s life during an extended illness.
Berman and Pulcini make Pekar’s cancer scare the third act of the American Splendor movie, following a second act about his rise to the level of cult celebrity, and a first act that begins with Pekar losing his voice and ends with him deciding to become a comic book writer. The first and last acts are bookends, both dealing with how health problems can slow the momentum of folks who live paycheck to paycheck. Giamatti does a superb impression of Pekar’s permanent grimace, but he also captures the man’s frustration at wanting to be recognized for more than just what he does to earn a living. The specter of mortality only makes that need more urgent.
Much of Pekar’s work, replicated in the film, has been about the unplumbed depths of everyday life and the office drones like himself who spend their off hours pursuing a passion for ballet, avant-garde jazz, computers, literature or what-have-you. In one of the movie’s best-realized adaptations of a Pekar story, “Alice Quinn,” our man runs into a housewife whom he knew a decade previous, during the one semester he spent at college. In one brief stretch, Pekar reveals vital information about why a guy as smart as himself never finished his education (a lack of self-confidence, primarily), while also sketching a portrait of a bright woman who maintains an interest in naturalist literature and, at the same time, reinforcing a vision of himself as a man haunted by loneliness.
The movie uses that vignette as a setup for the moment when Pekar meets Brabner and his life improves, and it’s fine to read American Splendor that way, as a kind of love story in which a cranky man meets a woman who cares for him, and they form a morose but sustainable little family. But the key to understanding “Alice Quinn” is Pekar and his old chum’s conversation about books. The central concept of Pekar’s work is that one shouldn’t be surprised to find a file clerk and a housewife in downtown Cleveland discussing Theodore Dreiser, just as one shouldn’t be surprised to find a file clerk who’s an expert on jazz, or a file clerk on friendly terms with counterculture icon Robert Crumb (played to perfection in the film by James Urbaniak).
The natural impulse is to assume that the very title of Pekar’s life’s work, “American Splendor,” is ironic, and certainly that’s how the folks at the Letterman show took it during Pekar’s brief tenure as a regular. That’s why Pekar had to get himself kicked off the show, so that he could stop other people from seizing his persona and forcing him onto the same flat, flimsy plane as sourpuss letter-hacks and grumpy cartoon cats.
At the conclusion of “Alice Quinn,” Pekar writes about finishing a Dreiser book and reflecting on his meeting with Quinn, and he notes, “I felt like cryin’; life seemed so sweet an’ so sad an’ so hard t’let go of in the end.” That’s what American Splendor—the comics and the movie—are all about, how living can be beautiful, and painful because it’s beautiful. For Pekar, the only way to stop worrying about the inevitability of death is to keep a record of what happened and file it away.
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