The press screenings for Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's docu/bio/dramedy American Splendor were packed to full capacity. The press agencies were urging all media outlets to RSVP early because seats were going fast. “Exciting”, I thought,”I better call a few times just to make sure I'm on the list”. This film had an aura and the vibrations emanating therefrom pulsed with an extraordinary confidence.
The faithful and always eager critics obliged and came out, like disheveled sea lions converging on the Arctic shores in mating season to fawn over the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner and to ogle the sure to be deemed “virtuoso” performances of Paul (Planet of the Apes) Giamatti as surly, strange underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar (pronounced Pea-Car) and “it” actress Hope Davis as his neurotic, lazily ambitious wife, Joyce.
Virtuoso means a person with masterly skill or technique in the arts. I looked it up and…
…I admit it. Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, based on a number of showcasing performances, are officially dubbed persons possessing masterly skill and technique in the art of acting.
Are you picking up on the faint aroma of sarcasm projecting from the last paragraph or so? What's bothering me here so much that I have to commence these otherwise pleasant proceedings with such negativity? Have I become as perpetually morbid and chronically unenthusiastic as the maestro Pekar himself? Why can't I just be happy with the perfectly entertaining, creatively produced, imaginatively imagined dirty, smudged, red, white, and blue bowl of fruit cocktail that is American Splendor?
The answer in a single word: hype. I expected more from a movie that took home gold in Cannes and wowed 'em at Sundance. Where was the urgency, the importance, the relevance? Harvey Pekar is a real person. His life is worthy of a movie, but he's no John Nash. He's not even John Holmes.
Here's the hard sell on Pekar: Grumpy Cleveland file clerk with the mind of a philosopher and the demeanor of a plumber makes it (barely) as a cult comic 
(not the superhero kind, but the “graphic novel” kind) writer and tops it all off by assembling a dysfunctional family unit and whipping cancer's unmerciful ass. Oh yeah