Harvey (Paul Giamatti) is a uniquely ordinary guy, trudging around his fluorescent-lit job as a file clerk, struggling to cope with a divorce, leading a dull life in the same city he was born in (Cleveland, to add insult to injury). To call him curmudgeonly is a bit of an understatement; sometimes he’s so aggravated that he can’t even form words, just an inarticulate, bilious sputtering. He’s something like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, except he actually has reasons to complain. His friendship with underground cartoonist R. Crumb (James Urbaniak -- speaking of Crumb, I got a nice nostalgic pang from seeing the sketches of The Yum-Yum Book, which I remember reading when I was very young, even though it was entirely inappropriate for children) inspires him to write a comic book “about nothing,” as Seinfeld would put it – just his quotidian, pedestrian (literally – he can’t afford a car) life, but with bitter, self-mocking humor (the best kind). Crumb and other cartoonists illustrate Harvey’s angsty musings, and the comics take off. Harvey gets fans, one of whom becomes his wife (Hope Davis), and a measure of fame, appearing regularly on Late Night with David Letterman as (the way he sees it) a sort of novelty act. But he never does make enough money to quit his day job filing medical records.
Giamatti is terrific, and you get the chance to see how well he apes Harvey because the real Harvey Pekar (along with assorted people in his life) shows up frequently to do some narration and meta-commentary (“This guy looks nothing like me!” he grouses about Giamatti). It’s sort of like watching the “making of” documentary simultaneously with the movie itself. (Trust me, it works a lot better than you might think.) They even use the actual footage from some of his appearances on Letterman, although for some reason, they stage Harvey’s final, self-destructive appearance using Giamatti and a horridly unconvincing Letterman stand-in, one of the film’s few wrong decisions. Supporting Giamatti’s stellar performance, Davis is great as the mousy, idiosyncratic Joyce (to explain why she eats meat when she’d really rather be a vegetarian, she says she’s a self-diagnosed anemic with allergies to vegetables: “I have all kinds of health issues that make it hard for me to make the political statements I’d like to make with my food”). But Harvey’s over-enunciating, proudly nerdy friend Toby steals the show, both in person and in alter ego (Judah Friedlander). (I snagged a promotional freebie pin that says, “Genuine Nerd,” a reference to a similar pin that Toby wears after he experiences the uplifting liberation of Revenge of the Nerds.)
American Splendor reminded me of Ghost World with its affection for its comic-book origins, the obsessive collecting, and the black, bitter humor. It’s as steeped in meta-commentary as Adaptation, folding back on itself in Escher-esque twists. It loses a bit of steam heading into the last part of the movie, when Harvey’s life undergoes some momentous changes, some good, some bad – it becomes more conventional, and humor gets set aside. But the ending manages to be warm without being sappy or artificial.
You probably wouldn’t want to hang out too much with Harvey (though the real Harvey seems to smile more than Giamatti’s angry, disconsolate portrayal); he makes me look like a ball of sunshine. But the movie is well worth your time: sharp, funny, and inventive.
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