It was 18 years ago — how time flies in the indie world — that the married directing team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman brought us “American Splendor,” an achingly humane, scabrously funny, miraculously playful and inventive lower-depths comedy based on the life and work of the lumpen verité comic-book diarist Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti in a performance of irascible brilliance.
The movie was an audacious triumph, and going forward one wanted, and expected, more great things from Pulcini and Berman.
In the years since, however, nothing they’ve done has come within miles of living up to the promise of that landmark film.
The odd thing is that their earnest empathy and craft is always on display; they have an instinct for pace, for camera angles, for how to seek out three dimensions in places where too many filmmakers settle for two.
Yet lightning has never struck again for them.
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