Joel Siegel Movie Reviews

ByABC News
September 25, 2003, 6:16 PM

Aug. 15 -- Now in theaters: American Splendor, Open Range, Pretty Dirty Things, The Secret Lives of Dentists and Step Into Liquid.

American Splendor One thing film does better than any other medium: It takes you to a place you've never been, a place you never dreamed of going and then, a few hours later, walks you back home.

American Splendor does that. It transports you smack dab in the middle of a tedious, trying, terribly unhappy life: Harvey Pekar's life.

Pekar is a clerk at the VA Hospital in Cleveland. He's balding, boring and bored. Yep, this is the stuff of real drama. Make that real-life drama. It's all true.

I know Harvey Pekar from the collections of comics he's authored, illustrated by R. Crumb and this film will remind you of Crumb, a fine documentary .

At he same time, however, Splendor will also remind you of Ghost World, a fictional film.

This movie can do that because it mixes fiction and documentary. As you watch Splendor, real people pop up in the film and comment on the actors who are playing them, bluring the lines between what's true and what isn't.

As Paul Giamatti plays Harvey Pekar, the real Harvey Pekar appears and says, "He don't look anything like me!" Actually, he looks exactly like him.

American Splendor doesn't celebrate the ordinary. It's a far better film than that: It surrounds us with the ordinary, to the point of despair.

Giamatti's Harvey wakes up one morning and says, "There's a reliable disappointment," as he stares at himself in the mirror. That's one of my two favorite movie lines of the summer.*

I'm not sure whether it's a great work of fiction or a great documentary, but one thing I am sure of, it's one of the best films of the year. Grade: A-

(*The other is the mother's desperate cry to the heavens in Bend It Like Beckham, "What did I do in a past life to deserve this?")

Open Range I love Westerns. They're so much a part of America.

My mom was born in Poland, and as a kid, English was more often than not a second language in our home. Now, as the father of a 5-year-old, I bemoan that he's not growing up with the cowboy heroes of the mythic American West.