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AIN’T
THAT
PEKULIAR?
COMPLEX STUFF
Harvey (Paul Giamatti) considers the colours of jellybeans with Toby (Judah Friedlander), for whom Revenge of the Nerds is a sacred text. Bottom, the real Harvey with wife Joyce Brabner and, below, Giamatti and Hope Davis as their fictional equivalents.
american splendor
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A SUNDANCE WINNER PICKING UP SOME
OF THE YEAR’S BEST REVIEWS IN THE US, AMERICAN SPLENDOR IS NOW SET TO
INTRODUCE INTERNATIONAL CINEMAGOERS TO THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HARVEY PEKAR,
ORDINARY CLEVELAND FILING CLERK AND
CARTOONIST EXTRAORDINAIRE.
HAL HAYES EXPLORES THE FILM’S UNIQUE
FICTIONAL TAKE ON A REAL-LIFE INDIVIDUAL.
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During the shooting of American Splendor, Harvey Pekar and his wife, Joyce, had the strange experience of sitting quietly on a film set, watching their lives being recreated. Doing the recreating were Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis. Shari Springer Berman, who co-directs the film with Robert Pulcini, vividly recalls their visits. “There were a couple of times when I’d turn around and there would be Paul sitting next to Harvey,” she says, “and Toby Radloff [Harvey’s obsessive workmate] sitting next to Judah Friedlander [who plays Toby in the film] and Hope Davis sitting next to Joyce. It was like all these doppelgangers hanging around.”
“Paul and Hope do tremendous jobs playing us as characters,” says Joyce. “We were doing double-takes. We just kept looking around going, ‘What is Harvey doing over there?’ Paul had the voice and everything.”
Indeed, both actors give the performances of their careers in American Splendor. Giamatti will be familiar to moviegoers from a host of unforgettable supporting roles, most recently in Man on the Moon, Planet of the Apes and Private Parts. “As one of the finest character actors working today,” says Pulcini, “Paul had yet to carry a film, and we hoped American Splendor could be his Marty [the 1955 film which won an Oscar for Ernest Borgnine].
“It wasn’t so much that we wanted someone who looked like Harvey, but we wanted there to be a very easy transition between the person playing Harvey and the real Harvey, in terms of the energy and the posture.
“Also, Harvey has a strange magnetism that causes your eye to go to him, and the actor playing him had to have that, too. These were
all the things that Paul brought when he auditioned so naturally for the role. Paul rose above any kind of imitation and he captured Harvey’s worldview, which is present even in his body language.”
Berman was equally impressed with Davis. “A lot of people read the role as a New York neurotic,” she says, “but Hope understood it to be much different. She wasn’t trying to go for laughs. And although a lot of what she does in the film is very funny, she really got Joyce on a deeper level.”
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and garlanded with critical praise wherever it has been shown, American Splendor is a distinctly un-airbrushed portrait of Pekar, a grumpy individual who has achieved cult status through his cartoon books, which deal unashamedly with the trials and tribulations of ordinary life. It is primarily a biopic, but with on-camera statements by the real-life participants, and a few bits of Pekar’s comic-book masterwork - the original American Splendor - thrown in for good measure.
Music is also a crucial element in the movie, much of it chosen by Pekar himself, a lifelong jazz fan. But not just jazz: Berman and Pulcini discovered that Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ was his favourite song, and enthusiastically incorporated it into the film.
“It’s such a wonderful phrase to sum up what Harvey does,” concludes Pulcini. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, Harvey finds a lot of things peculiar and he represents them’. And we thought the song would be a really wonderful moment of release for when he finds his creative voice.”
Pekar’s foster daughter Danielle, now 15, gives the film what, for a teenager, amounts to a rousing endorsement. “I really liked it,” she says. “Real life is more complicated, but it’s pretty good for a film.”
And Pekar himself? “I’m real happy,” he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer when they phoned him for a comment on the Sundance award. “I don’t know about awards… how much can they mean? But I’m happy for the people who made it. They’re very, very nice, they’re bright, they’re talented. If I had had contact with people like that every day, I wouldn’t be depressed and everything.”
American Splendor comes from the HBO Films stable, responsible for many of the cutting-edge features to slip under our guard in the past few years, including this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winner Elephant. And it is produced by Ted Hope who, likewise, has an impressive track record of such off-centre Oscar nominees as In The Bedroom and The Wedding Banquet. American Splendor is Hope’s last production for Good Machine, the company he set up with James Schamus but which was bought out by Vivendi Universal in May 2002.
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