Terry Zwigoff spent years with the cartoonist Robert Crumb and his two brothers, and made one of the saddest and most candid films about an artist we know. It is funny, it does not flinch, and parts of it are hard to sit through.
Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about the cartoonist Robert Crumb runs 121 minutes and spends surprisingly few of them on the cartoons. Crumb drew Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural and the Keep on Truckin’ men who ended up on a million T-shirts, and by the time the film catches up with him he has grown to hate the sixties and most of what has been said about him since. Zwigoff, an old friend, is interested in the work. He is more interested in where it came from, and the answer turns out to be a house in Philadelphia and two brothers. It is a candid, funny and desperately sad film, and among the best we know about an artist and his family.
Charles Crumb, the eldest, lives with their mother, takes his medication and has not left the house in years. As a boy he ran the family comic book and made Robert draw for it. Maxon Crumb, the youngest, lives in a San Francisco hotel room, begs on the street and sits on a bed of nails to meditate. Both brothers are clever and both are funnier than they have any right to be. Maryse Alberti films the Philadelphia living room with the curtains drawn and the lamps on, so the two men on the sofa look as if they have been sitting there since about 1958. She stays close and she does not move much. Nobody in this film is lit to look better than they do.
The scene we will not forget comes when Robert and Charles page through the comics Charles drew as a teenager. Over a few years the pictures shrink and the lettering grows, until the panels are nothing but small dense handwriting with no drawings left in them at all. Charles talks it through without self-pity, as though describing the weather. We were not ready for it, and we sat still for some time afterwards. It is the plainest picture of a mind closing that we have seen on a screen, and Victor Livingston’s editing lets it go at the speed of a page being turned.
The comics themselves are read rather than shown. Livingston and Alberti pan across the pages panel by panel, so that you take in the strip at the film’s pace and cannot skip the bits you would rather not see. Robert Hughes, the art critic, argues for them and puts Crumb alongside Brueghel. Deirdre English and Trina Robbins put the case against: the women drawn as bodies, the racial caricatures, the question of whether any of it is satire or simply what he likes. Zwigoff gives them room and does not talk over them, though he does let Crumb have the reply, and Crumb’s reply is always the same: he draws what is in his head and hopes it is not only in his. The best witness is Aline Kominsky, his wife and a cartoonist herself, who knows exactly what he is and has decided to stay.
David Boeddinghaus provides old-time piano, the ragtime and stride of the 1920s records Crumb collects and prefers to anything made since. It plays under the family photographs and the shots of the brothers, and it makes the whole thing feel like old footage even when it is not. Crumb says at one point that he cannot stand the world he lives in. The music agrees with him.
It is not tidy. Zwigoff shot over several years and cut the result together, and there is a stretch in the middle where fellow cartoonists such as Spain Rodriguez and Bill Griffith tell us Crumb is a genius and we learn nothing we did not know. Some of the time with Maxon made us uneasy to be watching; he says things about his past that a friendlier film would have cut, and Zwigoff keeps them in, and we are still not sure that was kind. The certificate is 18 and it is earned; the drawings are shown uncropped.
Zwigoff went on to Ghost World (2001), a fiction about two teenage girls who cannot stand anyone either, and it has the same patience with people who do not fit. This is the harder film. Watch it with someone who will not need to talk straight afterwards, and give yourself the evening; you will not want to put anything else on.
