![]() ![]() ![]() As a psychological study, Crumb is a smorgasbord of tics, twists and spasms. Yes, the film is insightful about family life in 1950s America: how post-war reality flattened the distorted/distorting dreams of financial and moral prosperity, and deflated Big America idealism in light of the tacky facts of middle-class life (despite the Leave It to Beaver image promoted by television). To try and locate gravitas in Crumb by avoiding the fact that it is a film about creativity is to miss the point entirely. Crumb's case-and his case only-the result was not just a dysfunctional human, but a functioning artist. All the Crumbs were formed in the same domestic crucible (kept roiling by the late and apparently tyrannical Charles Crumb Sr.) but in R. They illustrate, with a certain amount of ancillary dread, how Robert Crumb's genius is something like a cosmic/comic/psychic mutation. The brothers, and their mother too, are all morbidly fascinating people, but they are not included by Zwigoff in the film for their freak-show qualities. Narratively, Crumb is less a story than it is an olde curiosity shoppe of neuroses and creative impulses-or rather, impulses that lead to creativity-and features a roster of characters too odd for fiction: the touchingly damaged Charles Crumb, for instance, whose own comic-book genius is such a revelation or Maxon Crumb, the less endearing but no less demented brother, whose practices of self-mortification suggest a deeply troubled soul. But Crumb, throughout, maintains an acknowledgement of-and indifference to-his own peculiarities, and for that becomes an object of our affections. The women who know Crumb best cheerily dub him a sexual deviant. It was a sensation when first released, partly because of its audacious regard of so-called pop art as something for the ages: Critic Robert Hughes, famously, compares Robert Crumb to Bruegel. Alternately intimate and objective, it portrays a man who whines, giggles and kvetches his way through two hours of the most revealing nonfiction cinema ever produced. Crumb-as open wound and downbeat prankster, Crumb has to be considered now the Birth of a Nation of nerd chic. One of the more astute films in any genre to deal with the creative process, Crumb is probably also the first film to posit a counter-cultural icon as the product of post-traumatic stress disorder.Ī portrait of the artist-underground comix star R. Proof that cranky, banjo-playing misanthropes can be movie heroes, Crumb (1994) is a perfect synthesis of character, access and director Terry Zwigoff's eloquent invisibility. ![]()
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