‘You just get disgusted after a while with humanity…’
American filmmaker Terry Zwigoff has had a curious career. He began with two documentaries about a pair of outsider artists in avant garde musician Howard Armstrong and underground cartoonist Robert Crumb before moving into narrative film with his acclaimed 2001 film Ghost World. From there, however, Zwigoff pivoted into Christmas comedy with Bad Santa and then the more dramatic Art School Confidential before essentially retiring from filmmaking altogether. This is a shame, because as Crumb, his documentary about the aforementioned Robert Crumb, demonstrates, Zwigoff is certainly a unique voice in American cinema…
Released in 1994, Crumb follows the eponymous cartoonist over a six year period as he delivers an exhibition of his work, hangs out with his deeply strange brothers Charles and Maxon, and engineers a move to southern France with his wife, fellow cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. While Crumb is clearly a genuinely talented artist, his work often veers into racism and misogyny. While the film does directly address this (Crumb himself is unapologetic), it would have been nice to have heard a little more about the reaction in the wider world to some of his more outrageous work.
It’s obvious within the first five minutes of Crumb why Zwigoff has chosen this odd man as the subject of this make-or-break documentary (Zwigoff was considering suicide throughout the duration of the shoot). He is talented. He is eccentric. He’s certainly unique. The issue is, he’s also quite a predictable figure. Once the audience has spent an hour in his company, it very much feels like we’ve learnt everything we need to know about this man. Nothing about his behaviour in the second half of the film shocked me. Instead, Zwigoff wisely chooses to focus on Crumb’s two siblings, both of whom are fascinating characters, but this gives the film a strange, uneven feel.
While I can’t imagine a world in which I would ever watch Crumb again, it’s an innovative and distinctive film that stays with you after the credits have rolled, particularly as the film’s coda is so tragic.
