(Referring to these people as if they were fictional characters makes me uncomfortable, but the film’s careful establishment of their personalities makes it hard to do otherwise whether Zwigoff intends this or not, they become characters within the context of the film.) Most of what’s memorable about Crumb has to do with these brothers by the time the film is over, one is fully persuaded that if Robert weren’t drawing constantly and compulsively he’d be every bit as doomed as they are. ![]() ![]() Both of his brothers are also exceptionally gifted, self-aware artists, but unlike Robert they’re misfits who never climbed out of obscurity and often wound up institutionalized, on medication, or both. Let’s start with the sniggering, which we hear whenever Robert gets together with his older brother Charles (still living with their mother and unemployed since 1969) or his younger brother Maxon (living alone in a San Francisco flophouse, meditating two hours daily on a bed of nails). And has there been a decline in the quality of American life since the 1920s, as Crumb sorrowfully claims when we see him moving to France in 1993? Are most artists, including confessional ones, innocent of the meaning and impact of their own work? Can art making function as a bulwark against madness? What are the crucial differences between art, which is personal, and impersonal business franchises–especially in a society that so plainly values the latter over the former? And finally, what is the significance of sniggering? The vexing questions keep coming, questions like what the true legacy of the 60s counterculture is. What does it mean to be an American artist? What are the differences between satire and pornography, confession and entertainment, art and obsession, sanity and schizophrenia? What does it mean to have and be a brother, especially growing up in a brutally dysfunctional Catholic family–ruled by a violent father (he busted Robert’s collarbone when he was five) and by a mother addicted to amphetamines, a family whose three brothers slept together in the same bed until their teens? (Crumb’s two sisters declined to appear in the film, and it isn’t too hard to figure out why.) Even the movie’s title begins to seem metaphorical: one thinks of a crumb in the all-American cake, a slender morsel of American pie in the sky. Crumb’s life is thorny and depressing as well as fascinating, and Zwigoff’s approach is unusually serious and methodical: just about everything that’s said about Crumb is intelligent and seems to have been included because Zwigoff agrees with it on some level.īut despite the film’s clear and purposeful editing, the issues Zwigoff raises are complicated, disparate yet interrelated, big questions that torment the mind and heart–which may be one reason reviewers have had a rough time describing Crumb. ![]() Clearly Zwigoff sees Crumb as an artist, not just a comic book artist, and his multifaceted approach to this biographical terrain has all the elegance of three-dimensional chess: he crosscuts effortlessly between Crumb with his two brothers on opposite coasts and Crumb ruminating over his work at home and leapfrogs between Crumb’s first wife, son, two former lovers, and various colleagues and commentators. He noted in one interview that he was in therapy while shooting Crumb, a fact that’s surely left its mark on the material. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & RecreationĪ member of Crumb’s former band, the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and a fellow collector of rare 20s and 30s blues and jazz records, Zwigoff has previously made documentaries only on musical subjects–blues artist Howard Armstrong in Louie Bluie, a history of Hawaiian music in A Family Named Moe.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Ticket prices go up May 15 > Close
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