Harvey is one of those films I knew about through other sources, sort of a reflection off the pool of popular culture. If I had to describe what I knew before seeing the film, it would be a very simple and rather lifeless description – “man is friends with invisible six-foot-tall rabbit” – which is in a sense what the film is about but not at all what the film is about. Seeing things first in that reflection can give you a sense of their outline but rarely shows any of their features, so the real article is often radically different to the warped impression.
Elwood P. Dowd (James Stewart) is the quintessential nice guy – never without a smile or a kind word to people, a man who quite literally takes his time to stop and smell the flowers. He’s also never without his companion Harvey, a gigantic white rabbit that only he can see. His sister Veta (Josephine Hull) attempts to get Elwood committed so he will stop interfering with her social gatherings, which sparks off a series of farcical misunderstandings. The film purports itself to be a comedy, and it’s got its share of comedic moments and spots of broad humour, but I don’t think the label of just “comedy” quite does it justice: there’s some social commentary that’s still very relevent in the modern era about mental disorders and the way society treats its members who have them that are perhaps better handled with the light touch of a comedy than with the heavy hand of drama. Nearly everyone who Elwood introduces Harvey to begins to look at him as if he had just confessed to being a murderous psychopath – a couple of them even insinuate that he might be – when he’s clearly the furthest thing from a danger to anyone. One of the early farce setpieces in the film ends up with the sanitarium committing Veta and letting Elwood walk out the gates while the staff apologise profusely for the confusion (in the hopes he won’t want to sue them), the suggestion clearly being that maybe society has become too trigger-happy to diagnose and medicate anyone who deviates a little from the norm, and that’s not going to be the right solution in every case. Added to this is the idea that Harvey might not be a figment of Elwood’s imagination after all – that there just might be incredibly rare things out there like invisible giant rabbits and goodhearted people in the world, and that we might not be able to spot them because we’re too busy trying to fathom why they aren’t miserable bastards like the rest of us.
sarcasmbeast 