And his third wife, Joyce Grabner, herself something of an oddball, is impersonated by Hope Davis. But Berman and Pulcini have gone beyond this to make a multi-layered picture involving fictional recreation, newly shot documentary footage and animation, producing a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist as a troubled man.įor much of the time, the querulous Pekar is played by that excellent character actor Paul Giamatti, a specialist in losers, subservient sidekicks and sad sacks. The bizarre life of his friend Crumb became the subject of a 1994 documentary by Terry Zwigoff. But he didn't give up his day job or leave his small disorderly apartment in Cleveland. He became a cult figure through the rough-hewn comic with the ironic title American Splendor, and he appeared on nationally broad cast chat shows holding his own against a patronising David Letterman. His wry humour and unsentimental observation of his own humdrum life and that of those around him led to Pekar gaining a reputation as a 'blue-collar Mark Twain'. His motto might well have been Thoreau's observation that 'the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation'. He's a nondescript character from a Jewish working-class background, unprepossessing in appearance and dress, an obsessive collector of records and comic books, well read and articulate in a bar-room, corner-diner sort of way.īy a happy chance - and underpinned by his admiration of the naturalistic fiction of Theodore Dreiser's school - he started in the 1970s to write autobiographical comic strips that were drawn by Robert Crumb and other artists. Now in his sixties, Pekar has spent his life in the rundown Midwest industrial town of Cleveland, Ohio, working until his recent retirement as a clerk at a Federal Department of Veteran Affairs hospital. This situation renders problematic any recognition of the mountaineering epic, Touching the Void.Īmerican Splendor, a biopic of Harvey Pekar, a celebrated writer for comic books of the underground variety, is written and directed by documentarists Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who operate like confident guerrillas in some no-man's-land between fact and fiction. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, however, continues to offer separate Oscars for features and documentaries. Terms like 'semi-documentary', 'docudrama' and 'documentary reconstruction' deliberately blurred distinctions. Some later directors - Louis Malle and Michael Apted are notable examples - consciously switched between commercial features and what became known as cinéma vérité or cinéma direct, usually commissioned by TV. During the Second World War and its aftermath, feature directors such as Ford, Capra and Wyler made documentaries, while documentarists such as Cavalcanti, Harry Watt and Louis de Rochemont (of March of Time fame) turned to feature movies. Fiction movies, on the other hand, even the most extreme melodramas and escapist tales, can contain enduring truths.
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