Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994): USA

Reviewed by Byron Potau.  Viewed on DVD.

Terry Zwigoff spent five years filming his 1994 documentary, Crumb, about underground, counter culture cartoonist Robert Crumb.  It was time well spent as we get a brilliant portrait of this nerdy, toothy misfit in coke bottle glasses who looks like a pervert, and in some ways is one.

R. Crumb is going to be moving to France with his wife, as much for the rejection and disdain for American society as for the reason that she wants to move there, and the film intermittently follows him around in the time up to their moving day.  Through interviews of friends, family, wife and ex wife, fans, and critics, reactions and opinions are given about Crumb and his work, which is offbeat, risqué, and often times obscene.  Extensive time is taken on Crumb’s troubled brothers, Maxon and Charles, which is fascinating and most revealing about Crumb, and these scenes turn out to be the real meat of the film.

What makes Crumb a great film is not the tangible things we learn about him, like his love of old music, but the sense we get of who he is; he talks about his brothers, his father, and his childhood in such a way as to not realize just how revealing he is being.  Several small moments seem to resonate, as when Crumb matter of factly refuses to give an autograph to a fan in a comic book store.  The fan is so sincere and courteous that we assume he will get the autograph and we are as stunned as he is when he doesn’t, and we are left to wonder if Crumb is just an egotistical jerk, refusing purely on the basis that he does not believe in giving autographs.  We come to find out he is just so detached that it would never occur to him how this act might be perceived.  He simply doesn’t give autographs, and why would anyone question that?  This is not just a film for R. Crumb’s fans, but a film for people who want to know about a curiously interesting human being who happens to be a famous underground cartoonist.