Crumb movie review & film summary (1995)

"Crumb," which is one of the most remarkable and haunting documentaries ever made, tells the story of Robert Crumb, his brothers Max and Charles, and an American childhood that looks normal in old family photographs but conceals deep wounds and secrets. It is the kind of film that you watch in disbelief, as layer after layer is peeled away, and you begin to understand the strategies that have kept Crumb alive and made him successful while one of his brothers became a recluse in an upstairs bedroom and the other passes his time literally sitting on a bed of nails.

Movies like this do not usually get made because the people who have lives like this usually are not willing to reveal them. "Crumb" was directed by Terry Zwigoff, who had two advantages: He had known Crumb well for years, and Zwigoff was himself so unhappy and suicidal during the making of the film that in a sense Crumb let him do it as a favor.

Of Crumb's importance and reputation, there is not much doubt.

His original illustrations and the first editions of his 1960s and 1970s underground comic books command high prices. His new work is shown in galleries and is in important collections. No less an authority than Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, appears in "Crumb" to declare him "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century." But "Crumb" is not really about the art, although it will cause you to look at his familiar images with a new eye. It is about the artist, who grew up in a dysfunctional family led by a father who was an overbearing tyrant - a depressive, sadistic bully who, according to this film, beat his sons and lost few opportunities to demean them. (There were also two sisters, who declined to participate in the film.) All three brothers retreated into fantasies in an attempt to cope with their home life. It was Charles, the oldest, who first started to draw comic strips, and then Robert began to copy him. The brothers seem to have had strong fantasy relationships with comic characters; Charles began to pretend he was Long John Silver. And while it is one thing to learn that Robert masturbated while looking at comics, especially his own, it is another to learn that his prime erotic fixation was with Bugs Bunny.

Many of the people in Crumb's life talk with great frankness about him, including his brothers, his mother, his first wife, Dana (who says he began to develop a "new vision" in 1966 after experimenting with drugs), and his present wife, Aline Kominsky, who recounts bizarre details of his lifestyle with acceptance and understanding. We learn most, however, from Robert himself.

He was intensely unhappy in high school, nursed deep grudges against his contemporaries and uses high school enemies as the models for many of the unattractive caricatures in his work.

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