Review of Harvey

“Here, let me give you one of my cards. If you should ever want to call me, call me at this number, don’t call me at that one. That’s the old one. If you happen to lose the card, don’t worry, I have plenty more.”

If you have ever met Elwood P. Dowd, then he’s already told you this. He offers everyone he meets his card and invites them to dinner with him and his friend, Harvey. Doctors, ex-cons, gatekeepers, he doesn’t mind anyone’s company. You will never find a more congenital, gracious person. His sister and niece, however, are intent on having him institutionalized.

You see, Elwood’s friend is a six-foot three (and a half) tall white rabbit. Veta and Myrtle only want Elwood to get better and stop going on about Harvey as if he exists. There’s only one problem: Harvey does exist.

In the audio forward recorded before his death, Jimmy Stewart states that Harvey had always been one of his favorite films. That may seem odd at first, given his extensive career; but there’s an indubitable charm about the film. He goes on to say that the nature of the subject matter required two things to work: good writing, and better acting.

Harvey first ran as a play in the United States. Both Stewart and Hull acted their respective parts for the run. This aided in their timing and deliveries when the play was later adapted to film. Although many characters are affected by Harvey, the film relies on Stewart and Hull’s performances as its center of gravity. Hull for her hilarious, somewhat absent-minded reactions (a la Arsenic and Old Lace), and Stewart for his Zen-like tranquility no matter what the circumstances are.

The circumstances are fairly straightforward: in trying to have Elwood placed in an asylum, Veta is mistaken as the “insane” one. Mayhem ensues as doctors, judges, and family members try to get Elwood in his supposed rightful place. All of this, of course, isn’t a coincidence. Harvey has been hard at work. After all, he’s a pooka:

poo·ka [poo-kuh] -noun (in Celtic mythology) a fairy spirit in animal form, always very large. The pooka appears here and there, now and then, to this one and that one; a benign but mischievous creature; very fond of rumpots, crackpots…

The character of Harvey epitomizes the deceptiveness of the film itself. At first glance, it has all the trappings of a light screwball comedy. Yet there’s always that faint vein of sadness lying just below the surface. While being questioned by a psychiatrist, Elwood says: “Well, I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.” The film never goes into what his life was like before he met Harvey. Did he feel a need to escape something or someone of his past? Elwood never says. By all outward appearances, he has simply withdrawn from the world around him into one within him. Whatever he has found in this seclusion has turned him wiser.

The source of his sadness? Perhaps it’s Veta and Myrtle. Their desire to “help” Elwood is less altruistic than they would admit to others: so long as Elwood is known as a crackpot in their social circles, Myrtle will be shunned by any available men. As it turns out, Harvey solves this problem by setting her up with a handler named Wilson from the psychiatric ward–the very one that had seized her mother and threw her in the hydraulic tank. This roundabout way of settings wrongs to right seems to follow Elwood and Harvey wherever they go:

Harvey and I sit in the bars… have a drink or two… play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they’re saying, “We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fella.” Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers – soon we have friends. And they come over… and they sit with us… and they drink with us… and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they’ve done and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey… and he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.

It’s this acceptance of something bigger than him that has removed Elwood from the vicious circle that keeps us preoccupied with nothing at all until our time here is up.

Veta and Myrtle finally get what they want. Elwood graciously returns to the asylum to take a serum that will make him normal, better. The taxi driver that has driven the family there parts with a telling anecdote on the pitfalls of medicated normalcy:

I’ve been driving this route for 15 years. I’ve brought ‘em out here to get that stuff, and I’ve drove ‘em home after they had it. It changes them… On the way out here, they sit back and enjoy the ride. They talk to me; sometimes we stop and watch the sunsets, and look at the birds flyin’. Sometimes we stop and watch the birds when there ain’t no birds. And look at the sunsets when its raining. We have a swell time. And I always get a big tip. But afterwards, oh oh… They crab, crab, crab. They yell at me. Watch the lights. Watch the brakes, Watch the intersections. They scream at me to hurry. They got no faith in me, or my buggy. Yet, it’s the same cab, the same driver. and we’re going back over the very same road. It’s no fun. And no tips… After this he’ll be a perfectly normal human being. And you know what stinkers they are!

In the end, the two women must decide whether they want Elwood or their idea of who Elwood should be. Truthfully, it’s a decision we all have to make at some point.