Comic belief American Splendor reflects well on its subject BY PETER KEOUGH
	American Splendor Directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman. Written by Pulcini and Berman based on the comic book by Harvey Pekar. With Paul Giamatti, Harvey Pekar, Hope Davis, Joyce Brabner, James Urbaniak, Judah Friedlander, and Earl Billings. A Fine Line release (100 minutes). At the Avon.
	The Hulk? Or Harvey? Could what started out as the summer of the Hulk turn out to be instead that of his comic-book antithesis, Harvey Pekar? Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, the married directors of American Splendor, don’t want to bad-mouth the big green guy. After all, The Hulk’s producer and co-writer, James Schamus, had been one of their professors at Columbia University Film School and had once been partners with their own producer, Ted Hope. Besides, neither has seen it. But they do suggest that audiences might feel more of a connection with Harvey — a recently retired file clerk who is also a bibliophile, a compulsive record collector, a functioning melancholic, a cancer survivor, a border-line clutterer, and the blue-collar Proust of our age — than with the 15-foot mute green figment of computer animation. "We went to Cannes with this movie, and we were wondering how international audiences would respond, and they seemed to really love it," says Berman. "Talking to journalists from other countries, it was so funny how many people said, ‘I’m just like Harvey Pekar. You know, I have a record collection that’s taken over my home.’ It just seems there’s something about Harvey’s honesty and truth that’s universal. People just connect to it." Perhaps they see Harvey as the hero of the everyday, the champion of the daily grind, the Zola of zeroes, the Balzac of the banal? "Harvey’s impulse comes out of an artistic school of thought," Berman agrees. "His favorite writer is Theodore Dreiser. His favorite movie is The Bicycle Thief, and I think he feels that there’s art in the mundane, there’s art in ordinary life and especially in the life of the working-class individual. He wanted to create an authentic document of that life. I think that’s his artistic inspiration." Was Pekar — who appears as himself in the movie, along with Paul Giamatti, who plays the fictional Pekar, and Donal Logue, who portrays Pekar as a character in a play within the movie adapting the comic book about the life — as obsessive in shaping the film as he was in creating the comic book? "Harvey is a handful," admits Berman, "but he gave us a lot of freedom with the creation of the movie. He really didn’t try to control his image. In fact, the only thing he asked of us is to be honest and not to whitewash him. He really wanted us to do a warts-and-all portrayal, which is what he does in the comic book." Pekar’s wife, Joyce Brabner, was another story. One of the significant deviations from the truth in Splendor involved the circumstances behind the adoption of Danielle, their foster daughter. In the film she’s the daughter of one of Pekar’s illustrators, who abandons her because he can’t cope. It’s a complete fabrication (the actual illustrator on whom this character is based described it in the Village Voice as "dishonest art"). "Joyce asked for Danielle’s privacy," says Berman. "To not ever talk about her background. The one thing we have to remember is that these are private people and she’s a minor." But if some facts were changed to protect the innocent, others appear to have been altered to protect the guilty. In the ’80s, Harvey became a regular guest on the David Letterman show until one appearance where he confronted the host about an ongoing GE strike and that corporation’s connections to NBC, then Letterman’s network. Although Pekar’s other appearances on the program are shown in the film in their original footage, this one is a re-creation. Why didn’t NBC let the filmmakers use it? "It named a lot of names in the corporate ladder," says Berman, "and I guess they just felt like it was too political." "But we did have a bootleg copy of it," adds Pulcini. "We tried editing with it, and to be honest, it just didn’t work. It was very hard to hear because they were kind of screaming over each other, and we also felt dramatically at that point in the film that it was very much an interior sequence. He thinks he might have cancer and his wife is away and everything is spiraling . . . " As it stands, the re-created footage adds another wrinkle to the elusiveness of identity and the true nature of reality, which are recurrent themes in this extremely realistic and extremely self-conscious film. According to Berman and Pulcini, Pekar is already at work on a comic strip about the making of the movie about the comic strip about his life (an excerpt has appeared in Entertainment Weekly). Will they now make a movie about that? "I don’t know," says Pulcini with a laugh. "The self-reflection has to stop at some point." — PK

To judge from the success of reality TV, people crave the real thing. Whether they can recognize it anymore is another matter. American Splendor, adapted by documentary filmmakers Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman from Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic book, feels like the real thing; it’s banal, repetitive, pointless, squalid, ennobling, and far from pure and simple. That the hero himself has at least four incarnations in the film — seven if you include the three Harvey Pekars in the Cleveland phone book, more if you include different cartoon artists’ versions of him (Pekar writes his comics and then storyboards them with stick figures for illustrators who can draw) — suggests that even the most quotidian reality can be pretty elusive.

Putting Harvey Pekar between parallel mirrors might seem like an infinite multiplication of a cipher, Adaptation for everyman, Seinfeld for the masses. But far from being strained or tiresome, the process is fascinating, often moving and hilarious, and sometimes revelatory. Harvey takes the mask of illusion off early — in fact, he never puts it on. Trick-or-treating with other kids dressed like Batman, he’s the only one without a costume. The nice woman at the door asks him which superhero he is. "I’m just a kid from the neighborhood," he snaps, indignant, and storms off. "Why are people so stupid?" he snarls.

A match cut a few decades later finds Pekar (Paul Giamatti) with the same slumping stride and the same incredulous expression. Not only haven’t people gotten any smarter, but Harvey seems to be losing his voice — a doctor tells him that all that yelling has left nodes on his vocal cords, and that unless he wants to be permanently mute, he’ll have to remain silent for several months. He’s also losing his wife (number two?), who just got her PhD and is tired of the "plebeian" lifestyle provided by his job working as a file clerk in the VA hospital. The scene in which Harvey begs her to stay in a voice that sounds like a deflating tire is one of the saddest and funniest farewells you’ll ever see.

But Splendor doesn’t let the audience get too caught up in that particular narrative — already it’s becoming a cliché. Like Harvey, the film takes off the mask of illusion early on. Minutes in, just as we’re getting comfortable with Giamatti’s brilliant and bristly performance, the real Pekar appears in an all-white studio space (the blank page? the space outside the frame?) littered with props from the movie, where he chats with one of the directors about his life and its representation in comic books and now on film.

How did he get from the streets of Cleveland to the movie screen? As Pekar — both the real one and Giamatti’s version — tells it, he happened to bump into R. Crumb (an arch and nutty James Urbaniak, and one of the few characters in the film whose real version doesn’t make an appearance in the white limbo of the film outside the film) at a yard sale. A jazz collector like Harvey and a comic-book artist, Crumb would soon become the star of the underground-comics scene with wacky, subversive characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural. Why, thought Pekar, couldn’t there be a another kind of comic character, neither superhero nor countercultural wack job but an average guy with an unremarkable life and a lot to say about it? Someone like . . . Harvey Pekar? Crumb agreed to illustrate his stories, and American Splendor was born.

A version of the American Dream, no doubt, though this one is born in pain and doubt and will endure turmoil and despair to face a dubious future. Pulcini and Berman demonstrate the transformation of Pekar’s drab and untidy life into a kind of art with deft economy. Thought balloons appear over Pekar’s head, and his encounters with the hardcore eccentrics of his workplace — Tobey (Judah Friedlander), who is like Rain Man with a sense of irony; Mr. Boats (Earl Billings), the black, brusque, and paranoid supervisor — turn into haiku-like R. Crumb panels.

This art brings rewards: women (one, anyway) and fame. Joyce (Hope Davis), who works in a comic-book shop in Delaware, corresponds with Harvey, and their eventual meeting — they get married a week later — is the uproarious, unconventional complement to Pekar’s parting from his second wife. Things look up even more when he’s booked on the Letterman show, where he’s second in popularity to Stupid Pet Tricks and serves as the host’s feisty foil ("You look like the guy asleep on the bus," Letterman describes him, accurately).

And here is where the film’s major conflict occurs, and where perhaps it compromises its integrity, if only a little. Distraught that he might have cancer and that his wife might be leaving him, and fed up with Letterman’s condescension, Pekar confronts the host about his station’s ties to big corporations who victimize the little guys like himself and whom Letterman is too craven to attack with his so-called satire.

Or so it seems. The program, re-enacted (the other Letterman appearances we see are original footage), is blurred, and the issues and names are indecipherable, and suddenly it becomes clear that American Splendor has all happened in a void, in that white space outside the frame, a place where politics and history and anything other than the solipsistic annoyances of Harvey Pekar don’t intrude. It’s real, I suppose, but not quite the real thing.