Comic Relief

HARVEY PEKAR'S STRIPS COME TO LIFE IN AMERICAN SPLENDOR

It's my job and all, I know, but damned if I can explain why this movie works. American Splendor is based on the autobiographical comic books of the same title written by Harvey Pekar and illustrated by any number of cartoonists, most notably Robert Crumb. Pekar, who presents himself as a kind of epic, holy crank, writes about his working-class boho life in Cleveland—a series of bad dates, unreliable friends, dead-end jobs, and bouts of crotch scratching. These tales aren't big on drama, but Pekar has a poet's gift for tapping into the pools of rage, anxiety, and longing that well up behind mundane surfaces and banal transactions. So, great. But how do you turn that into a movie? The directors, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, took a look and saw another Annie Hall, though Woody Allen and Diane Keaton seem as evenkeeled as Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower in comparison with Pekar and his third wife, Joyce Brabner, played by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis. Their courtship is one of the most unlikely ever

committed to film. He takes her back to his garbage-strewn apartment, she vomits, he whines, love blooms. Like Annie Hall, American Splendor takes all kinds of structural risks, not least among them inserting scenes of the real Pekar commenting on the action— yet one more reason this touching, original film shouldn't work, and certainly not so spectacularly. (Rating: ★★★★)

BRUCR HANDY

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