THE SPLENDOR OF AMERICAN SPLENDOR

Comics show the complexity of ordinary lives. This line was uttered by Harvey Pekar to his then date Joyce Brabner, played by Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, respectively, and this line, ladies and gentlemen, also sums up the irony and intelligence in what, by far, is the greatest movie I have seen all of this year and last.

I may be biased. For a number of times my acts and attitudes had been dictated somewhat by the philosophies of animated characters appearing in strips of 4 or 5 frames, conversing in balloons. This child-man, since childhood, is a product of the cartoon revolution and if a composite sketch was needed by a professional profiler, the comics are a rich source: I have the big head and melancholy of Charlie Brown; the metabolism, cluelessness, and handyman-idiocy of Dagwood Bumstead; the loyalty to work and all relationships of Joe Cobb; the abodic (?) laziness of Hagar the Horrible (though I take a bath many times a day); the ability of Danae (Non-Sequitur) to project and look back without putting the prospects and retrospects to good use, sucks; and the patience of Dilbert (but unlike him, my ties are perpetually unwrinkled).

Really, I am not biased. When I entered the moviehouse I did not even know American Splendor was about a cartoonist's movie nor that American Splendor is an underground comicbook which, because of this movie, may jeopardize its aura of raw cartoon power in the same mould that pop culture had eaten up the poetic sensibility of Mike Myers or the mystery of The Edge. The movie's magical foundation is not the comic's touch - though that's pretty strong, too - but it was in the message fully and convincingly relayed that if we only stopped and gave a chance to pay attention, there is happiness attained even in the loneliest of streets, warmth during the coldest of all winters, and wisdom from the jerkiest and nerdiest of people. Life professor was right: Compared to a fish, the directors Berman and Pulcinni tried to show the fishbones with heads and tails, bereft of meat, but like a cat you still see beauty in the skeleton, let humans have the flesh!

The fresh approach was worth a million. It was in part a theatre within a movie within a movie (don't get turned off, it was not that complicated) and at times, the characters' thoughts were delivered to the audience via a balloon pointing to the thinking character, a la cartoon strip, and sometimes the characters morph into their comic character (Harvey Pekar's comics were about himself and the people around him, a true-to-life cartoon), juxtaposing reality with animation, showing the metaphysics of living that we, all of us, in the fact of our existence, partly real people, partly cartoon characters. And don't we always ask...

What's up doc?