Crumb

What are the odds that an artist can survive family violence, mental illness, sexual rejection, and Big Mac culture? As far as this film can make clear, three members of the Crumb family had strong artistic temperaments and significant talent. Only one, Robert, made it out alive, and his life and work are defined by resistance to what should have been a sad fate.

To many, this documentary may be depressing, offensive to women, or just too damn ugly to sit through, but it made me as happy as anything I've ever seen on screen. Art's ability to reveal truth and promote survival is evident in every frame. I admire R. Crumb's courage to speak unpopular truths, to draw what gets him off, and to ferret out the art he loves at considerable expense and trouble (he's a blues maven; one of my favorite scenes, where's he's sitting on his floor absorbed by aching music, is echoed in Ghost World, when Enid takes home Seymour's record and gets lost in her favorite song). And like Ghost World, ratty, real American culture is railed at hilariously: another favorite scene involves R. on a park bench, disgustedly commenting on the ugliness of everything around him: logo-emblazoned clothes, graceless music, ugly plastic everything.

By the end of it all, I respected and liked him Crumb enormously. I'd take his scary-woman worship over the banal musings of a dime-store philosopher any day. And Terry Zwigoff deserves much praise for being able to pull it off (especially as a first-time filmmaker who had very little idea what he was doing). From high art and family pathos to a lovely animal appreciation of big round female asses, this is far more a "roller-coaster, I laughed/I cried" film than most others so touted.

Legendary underground comic artist Robert Crumb of "Keep on Truckin" fame is transported back home--courtesy of his equally eccentric friend and cult director, Terry Zwigoff--to pay a visit to his wacky and disturbed family. Crumb, reluctantly, encounters his two bothers and mother in varying degrees of emotional collapse. The mother is a piece of work. She is in total denial about her boys. Crumb's two sisters, however, remain absent from the family's tragic downward spiral--and they don't participate (wisely) in Zwigoff's pet project (The story goes that the director threatened suicide to gain Crumb's full cooperation. Who knows the truth?) Back at the ranch--Crumb does live in the country--the artist's father is dead. His older brother lives in a single room on San Francisco's Skid Row, where he bathes sometimes and sleeps on a bed of nails. He also has dark thoughts about Asian women. Once in a while, he acts on them. His other bother lives with their crazy mother, never works, and reads and collects mountains of old, yellowed and tattered paperbacks. He refuses to read anything new. Everyone is manic depressive. On drugs. And bananas. But somehow Crumb has struck a balance between his art and personal life. He survives nicely with his wife and their daughter in a comfortable ranch house. The dwelling serves dual purposes: protection for his massive and priceless blues record collection, and personal solitude from an encroaching outside world. His next step is a permanent move to France! In the end, Crumb, the movie, is a worthwhile odyssey for anyone who wishes to feel better about their own family. You might find this movie on the bottom shelf of the video store or at a psych ward near you.

What makes Crumb such an intriguing documentary isn't the fact that man looked at through the camera is admirable or interesting or laudable, although one could make the argument that R. Crumb is all of those things. No, what makes Crumb such a great film is the way it shows the twisted nature of Crumb against the backdrop of his nearly psychotic family. Compared to the world, R. Crumb is a sexual deviant, a lunatic genius, and a perfect candidate to be taken away in a plain white van. Compared to his family, R. Crumb is completely and utterly normal. It's this juxtaposition that makes Crumb work over all two hours the movie needs to take its course.

Robert Crumb became an idol among hippies in the 1960's because of the psychedelic comics he drew at the time. In this excellent film, directed by Terry Zwigoff (who also directed the excellent, and also comic book related, "Ghost World" and "American Splendor") Crumb starts out by telling that he hates just about all the work he is most famous for. This is typical, Í think, of Crumb: he is uncompromisingly politically incorrect, completely unafraid to speak his mind openly, and above all disgusted by the idea of selling out for money.

I have been a fan of Crumb ever since I advanced beyond Donald Duck and Marvel Comics about 20 years ago (this is not to say that I don't love Donald or Marvel anymore, because I do). Crumb is probably the most talented comic book artist of the latter half of the 20t Century. Quite simply, I don't think anyone can draw as well as he does. He is not much of a storyteller, but like I pointed out above, that is more than made up by the fact that he is always totally candid about his life, sometimes painfully and embarrassingly so.

"Crumb" is an excellent portrait of an exceptionally talented artist who also happens to be a total pervert. However, as this film makes abundantly clear, Robert Crumb is practically the ideal model of a stable, well-adjusted person when compared to his mother or his brothers Charles and Maxon. We see once again that great suffering makes a great artist.

Robert Crumb must have had a bellyful of people calling him a genius, but that's exactly what he is. Having grown up a bullied, miserable child - and an anachronism almost from the start, with his interests in pop culture ephemera and old-time music - in a dysfunctional family (his father was an overbearing tyrant, his mother an amphetamine addict, his older brother so obsessed with comics that he forces his siblings to draw them), Crumb escaped this drudgery by fleeing to Cleveland, where he first became a staff artist for a greetings card company, then one of their most innovative and prolific designers, before relocating to San Fransisco. His initial impetus was to "get some of that free love stuff", but his pen ran away with his thoughts and he wound up virtually launching the underground comics movement. Between 1968 and 1993, Crumb produced some of the funniest, most outrageous, licentious and flat-out brilliant comic book work of all time, and this film is an invaluable insight into the man behind the madness and the mayhem. Turns out Crumb, despite his bizarre appearance (he's stick thin, wears Coke-bottle spectacles and dresses like a character actor from a 1930s comedy) and sexual deviance (he likes nothing more than hefty haunches and big, strong legs in a woman), is something of an everyman - he's married, dotes on his understanding wife and gifted daughter, and feels just as alienated from the 'evils' of modern living as the rest of us sensitive intellectuals! At first glance, of course, Crumb is as weird as they come, but the sight of the aforementioned older brother Charles (a reclusive crank who rarely leaves his squalid bedroom, let alone the house) and younger brother Maxon (a haunted, bedraggled amateur mystic, given to sitting on beds of nails and begging on the street with a wooden bowl) throws the relative sanity of Robert into stark relief. One gets the impression that if Robert had not escaped, he'd have wound up suffering just as much as Charles and Maxon, possibly even more. This isn't easy viewing and the subjects are undeniably resistable, but it does offer a unique and enlightening glimpse into the reality of the old cliché about genius and madness walking hand-in-hand. Recommended.