American Splendor - A-
Now Playing: (2003, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini) [seen in theatre]
Couldn't avoid feeling some deja vu in the film's opening minutes, mostly due to broad similarities to Terry Zwigoff's work (Crumb's a supporting character here, Harvey collects jazz records and complains about the world), but as the film transpired it revealed itself to be an original. The mix of real-Harvey interview footage and dramatic re-enactments of his life, instead of turning the film into a distanced meta-filmmaking experiment, actually bring the audience closer to the characters. This may be because Harvey's a chronicler himself, and the film is in his corner a mostly sharing his worldview, and also because the dramatic scenes serve to do what any biopic worth its salt does, that being to capture the essence of the real person through key incidents that function as shorthand for the stuff that didn't make it into the movie. Harvey is interesting because he doesn't fit into any kind of stereotype mode- he'd not a blue collar shlub, he's not an intellectual or a snob, he's not even a nerd like his coworker Toby Radloff- and this I think helped form his perspective on the world, as an eternal outsider who has little to do other than collect impressions and filter them onto the page. This is a rare movie about outsiders that invites us to laugh without condescending to them- like in the scene where Toby rhapsodizes about Revenge of the Nerds, we marvel like Harvey does at how passionate Toby is about it even while laughing at the object of his affection (and his singular pronunciation of the word "nerds"). Paul Giamatti doesn't much look like Harvey- then again, neither did some of the versions of him in the comics- but delivers a convincing interpretation anyway; Hope Davis is spot on as Harvey's wife and kindred spirit Joyce. Supporting roles are well cast too; in particular, James Urbaniak is a scream as Crumb. Here's further evidence that the conventional biopic is pretty much dead, while fresher takes (such as Jacquot, 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould and now this) are the way the genre needs to go.