I was drawn to this flick as I channel surfed on IFC. Once you start watching, you cannot take your eyes away, like watching a train wreck. This is one very strange person, and one is ready to consign him to the loony bin until you meet the rest of the family, whereupon Robert comes up looking like the very picture of sunny sanity. His brothers Max and George are so clearly unbalanced (and mom's wrapping isn't very tightly tied either), and in mental pain, that it is disturbing to listen to their tortured self-analyses; yet, like some sort of horrible natural disaster unfolding before your eyes, you feel compelled to watch. The home in which George lives with his mother is a showcase of squalor. The revelations of their horrible childhoods with a sadistic and bullying father and an amphetamine-crazed mother, are further horrors in this macabre family story. The refusal of the 2 sisters to be interviewed for the story is an omission that speaks loudly, in view of the revelations of the twisted sexual fantasies of all three brothers; one cannot help wondering what the sisters would have had to say.
Aside from Crumb's apparent weirdness, right down to his off-the-wall physical appearance and sartorial habits, his comments on American culture - its materialism and its aesthetic barbarism - are dead on. One notes with interest the photography collection Crumb show us of power lines, telephone poles, traffic signals, and the other arcana of the ugly technological "background view" of our culture - to which we have become inured - which he uses as a reference for his work, because who could imagine such stuff?
Robert Crumb - or at least the impression one takes of him from this movie - is an ambiguously enigmatic character, driven by darkly bizarre inner sexual demons, yet with a weird sort of innocence and compelling aesthetic vision that isolates him from American culture. We are not surprised, at the end, when he decamps himself and his family off to a village in southern France. We are also not surprised to learn that George committed suicide shortly after the completion of the project.
The movie itself is coldly dispassionate, making no commentary or judgement on these people, but letting everything and everyone speak for himself. The result is a disturbing yet compelling portrait of a troubled artist and the personal and family history that shaped him.
Aside from Crumb's apparent weirdness, right down to his off-the-wall physical appearance and sartorial habits, his comments on American culture - its materialism and its aesthetic barbarism - are dead on. One notes with interest the photography collection Crumb show us of power lines, telephone poles, traffic signals, and the other arcana of the ugly technological "background view" of our culture - to which we have become inured - which he uses as a reference for his work, because who could imagine such stuff?
Robert Crumb - or at least the impression one takes of him from this movie - is an ambiguously enigmatic character, driven by darkly bizarre inner sexual demons, yet with a weird sort of innocence and compelling aesthetic vision that isolates him from American culture. We are not surprised, at the end, when he decamps himself and his family off to a village in southern France. We are also not surprised to learn that George committed suicide shortly after the completion of the project.
The movie itself is coldly dispassionate, making no commentary or judgement on these people, but letting everything and everyone speak for himself. The result is a disturbing yet compelling portrait of a troubled artist and the personal and family history that shaped him.