“Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”


At first glimpse Harvey Pekar is not quite the guy you love to hate, like his associate R. Crumb who has already been immortalized in film (in Terry Zwigoff’s justly acclaimed 1994 documentary Crumb). And neither is he the guy you hate to love. But rather it seems that it is hard to muster up anything but an unintentional despondency that matches the way he would probably think about you if you ever met him. Pekar is that guy whose life millions have followed in detail through the decades in the pages of the graphic novel series American Splendor. From the frustrated grumblings of his stick figure self-portrait scribbled out nightly after his file-clerk day job arose an unsettling everyman, just living his measly little file-clerk life by the light of the splendor that is America.


His “America” is the editorially squalid, industrial complex that is Cleveland, a fitting landscape for the medium of pen and ink. In the comic series we simply watch Harvey’s life happen against this minimalist environment. His high points include: divorces, a dead-end day job, the absurdly unromantic relationship with the love of his life: Joyce Brabner, literally finding the daughter they always wanted, life-threatening cancer, etc... For such a commonplace life that is presented in such a low-key monotone, it is a remarkable matter of public knowledge. The film version of American Splendor, however, takes us one step beyond the covers of the infamous comic. Paul Giammati channels the witty snarl of Harvey in this compelling narrated film version of the highpoints of his life that at times leap immediately out of the pages of the comics themselves. The unique feature of the film is an interchange between the realism of the camerawork and the pasting of stark comic images right into the frame itself that enables each to expose the limitations of the other. Since Pekar used a great number of illustrators over the course of his life, his visage has been penned through the series of comics in any number of permutations that differ greatly from each other.


These different versions of Harvey hover around Giammati’s character as an evolving commentary on the character himself. In a telling scene, as Brabner waits to meet him for the first time in a train station, she glimpses several common versions of Pekar in his comics. She sees Crumb’s version with the stink lines in one corner juxtaposed by the clean and pensive version sitting on the bench. Perhaps the attractiveness of the American Splendor series is that it justifies our ability to create and abandon our own self-perceptions, while at the same time acknowledging that we can never do anything about the way others perceive us. Somewhere in this distinction lies the capacity to be who you really are without having to apologize to everyone for it.


And then there is yet another layer of deconstruction that picks at the edges of who Harvey really is. This serially punctuated drama is framed by interludes of conversation with the real Pekar that take place on an eerily half-decorated set. At times his wife and various frequent visitors to the pages of his life appear on this set to clean up the rough edges of the storyline with their own observations and perceptions of certain events. And what we find here behind the iconic American image that is “Harvey Pekar” isn’t a hero or an auteur, but just the person he always said he was: a file clerk.


One of the most recent issues, Our Cancer Years, chronicles the emotional life of Harvey as he deals with a malignant lump discovered over the course of a brief manly scratch. In this fateful episode, the characteristic wry misery with which the comic also faces this difficult time is exposed for what it is: the heartfelt reaction of someone in touch with his hopeless place in life. But what we then gain access to in the film version are the tender moments and chance gleams of hope that lie behind all of the doom and gloom. Not to say that the film in any way undercuts the classic Pekarian persona, but rather it seems to put a human face on Harvey’s intense rhetorical perspective. Giammati’s hunch-baked performance of Pekar as a man literally bent low by the pressures of life is illuminating. He brings this influential personality to life in every gesture, glare, and pensive step. The sheer intelligence of this performance is matched by Hope Davis’ attempt to become Harvey’s wife. If anything, their chemistry together reveals that at the heart of the film version of American Splendor is a genuine love story, as refreshing as it is strange.