American Splendor – rated – HOT! HOT! HOT!

This is the most innovative film I’ve seen in a long time.  The visual style is inventive, right from the opening scene. Even if you don’t like commix or graphic novels, and even if you’ve never heard of Harvey Pekar or Robert Crumb, you should see this film, because it does clever things with the medium. And there’s a great jazz score.

The film is about a man who became famous by writing a comic strip about his boring, tedious life.  But the film-makers have shown us that even in tedium there is fascination.  And of course Harvey is in fact highly intelligent, observant and funny, so even his tedium is worth watching.  Like Jerry Seinfeld he observes the hilarious in everyday life, but unlike Seinfeld he has great humanity, and the film makers understand this.

Not only does the character of Harvey Pekar appear in the film (played superbly by Paul Giamatti), but the real Harvey appears too, commenting wryly that Giamatti looks nothing like him.  In fact, Giamatti looks more like the comic strip Harvey than the real Harvey does.  The real Harvey narrates, and comments on the action, and is also interviewed.  Before the film, there was not only Harvey’s real life, and a comic strip and a book of his real life, but there was also a play.  So there are many layers going on here.

Hope Davis is wonderfully deadpan as Harvey’s wife Joyce Brabner and Judah Friedlander is literally unbelievable as Toby Radloff - that is until you see the real Toby Radloff. There’s also a fabulous array of tacky restaurants, and aptly deployed pop songs such as “Ain’t that Peculiar (which we in two versions – both of which encapsulate the whole theme of the film)  and “The Pina Colada Song”.  The only false note in the whole film comes when the adopted daughter Danielle says “You are an obsessive compulsive.”

That said, this is almost a perfect bio-doco.