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The failure of Crumb to gain an oscar nomination for best documentary is as unfathomable as the more publicized case of "Hoop Dreams." Terry Zwigoff's portrait of R. (Robert) Crumb, the great underground cartoonist, is a marvelous movie, an instant American classic. Filmed on a shoestring over six years, "Crumb" has an amazing intimacy in its depiction of Crumb (now 52) and his hair-raisingly dysfunctional family. Only Zwigoff, a friend for 25 years, could have gotten so close to the blatantly furtive artist. The presence of Crumb turns the screen into giant living Crumb panels; the artist is skinny, gulch-chested, bottle-glassed, goofy-grinning, flat-hatted. But his hands, popping out of too short sleeves, are the big mitt s of a jazz pianist or a master draftsman.
Crumb's genius transcended the underground comics (or comix) of the '60s, when he became famous for such characters as Mr. Natural, Flaky Foont and Fritz the Cat, who marched out of his stoned head like his famous image "Keep on Truckin'." That big-footed parade became the ubiquitous "Kilroy Was Here" of the counterculture. But Crumb was no hippie; he hated rock and flunked out as a flower child. Still, it was LSD, he says, that gave him the "visionary change, the revelation of some seamy side of the American unconscious."
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His forays into those sordid seams, his sexual fantasies involving Amazonian women, have offended plenty. The movie scans his strip "Joe Blow," the satirical tale of an Ozzie-and-Harriet type family that zips cheerily into incest. His African character, Angelfood McSpade, is seduced by white guys into coming to the United States, where she winds up cleaning johns (don't ask how) and being sexually humiliated. Crumb is a Swiftian satirist; Swift's "Modest Proposal." with its deadpan suggestion of relieving poverty by converting poor children into food for the rich, is a very Crumbian concept: you can imagine the outrage if it had been Crumb's graphically depicted idea.
As art critic Robert Hughes says in the movie, Crumb, "the Brueghel of the second half of the 20th century," works in the tradition of graphic artist as social protester. Crumb is also our Bosch: lie sees modern life as a kind of hilarious hell. He walks through San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the bivouac of the '60s hippies, and is appalled by the jumbled urban jungle. half squalid, half gentrified. He rails against the commercialized, "market-research Culture" and turns down a Hollywood offer.
The most powerful and moving scenes in the movie are the visits he makes to his brothers,, Charles and Max. We learn about their late father, a tyrannical ex-Marine who once broke Robert's collarbone. Charles, himself a brilliant cartoonist in youth, became suicidally depressed and has been living with his mother since high school. Max suffers from epileptic fits and lives in a fleabag hotel, meditates on a bed of nails and paints surreal visions. Zwigoff's searching but compassionate approach raises profound questions about the dark, tangled sources of creative power. "Robert would rather be a brain in a jar than a person in a body," says his wife, Aline. But "Crumb" has shown us the brain, the body, the mind of a key artist of our time, who keeps on truckin'.
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