Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 22, 1995 TAG: 9507250028
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The underground cartoonist who is most famous for works he despises - the "Keep on Truckin''' cartoon and "Fritz the Cat" - is all of these things. Perhaps most familiar to baby boomers (although younger people will probably recognize his work), Robert Crumb does have a talent for the disturbing and offensive. If he were to make a commercial for a toilet bowl cleaner, he'd want a close-up of the disgusting grime that collects inside the bowl. And then he'd stuff a housewife's face in for comic effect. And she might not be wearing anything but an apron. But somehow, it would say something about the absurdity of the profit-driven world we live in and our insatiable need to control and sanitize our environments.
An art critic for Time magazine tells the camera that the humankind Crumb depicts is "lusting, suffering and crazed." A female artist calls him a case of arrested development and his work pornographic and misogynistic. His wife says he pours out his id. A gallery owner calls him "the Daumier of our time."
This documentary, directed by Terry Zwigoff and produced by David Lynch, draws no conclusions and lets Robert Crumb unfold from the pages of his sketch books, offering ample evidence of every side of the argument about him. Think what you will.
But on one point the movie leaves no room for debate: His is a fertile, seemingly hormone-fed imagination. He may be repressed in his actual life, but that repression is the ink into which he dips his pen to draw.
What comes out we may or may not want to admit is familiar to the dark side we all possess. But it's always cathartic to observe a life - or art - that gives free expression to all aspects of its nature.
It would be wrong to call "Crumb" fun. It is, in moments, but his art and the interviews with his family (as gifted and much crazier than he) are like a thump on the head. It's painful, but we all need to be rattled every now and then.
Crumb
***1/2
A Sony Pictures Classics release, 2 hours, showing at the Grandin Theatre. Rated R for a real variety of profanity - visual and otherwise.
by CNB