The most uncomfortable sequences in Crumb, though, are concerned not so much with Robert, as with his brothers, Charles and Maxon. Recollections of childhood comic clubs and adolescent mischief do nothing to prepare the viewer for the reality of these men thirty years later. Charles mumbles in a heavily-tranquilized, monotone croak about the sadist he had for a father, about he can no longer achieve an erection, about how separated he is from the rest of humanity, and how he spends his time re-reading Victorian novels. It is crushing to watch, but there's a streak of jet-black humour running through his tales that serve to simultaneously make them bearable, and also make them all the more devastating, when an onscreen note at the end of the film throws everything that has just unfurled into heartbreaking monochrome.
Maxon, the slightly younger sibling, he now paints with oils, his apartment littered with his most recent work, work what is undeniably impressive. He jokes about his urges to molest women, urges what resulted in a jail sentence, and then he whips out a bed-of-nails for to sit on whilst chewing a length of chord. It cleans out his intestines, apparently.
Ultimately, what emerges is that, of the Crumb fellas (the two sisters declined to be interviewed), Robert is, amazingly, the most well-adjusted. But it is perplexingly difficult to connect these disheveled, unshaven, wrecks of men with the photographs of good-looking, strong, well-built high-school students what occasionally illustrate their anecdotes.
Anyone who spent drunken evenings defending Crumb's work from charges of misogyny or lack of humanity will, I'm afraid, feel utterly defeated after these two hours of grimmest banter. It is somewhat shocking to note that yes, those cartoons, those drawings, they were just as vile, and intentionally so, as you quietly feared.
Crumb's scribblings of women without heads and grossly exaggerated behinds, who exist purely for male sexual gratification, are, it transpires, quite accurate representations of just how he does, in fact, see women 99% of the time. If you thought, or hoped, it was some cunning attack on contemporary American morality and hypocrisy, then you're wrong. Crumb just doesn't like women. Not at all.
Except his daughter, of course, whom he dotes over in some of the most bittersweet sequences.
So, yeah, Crumb is something of a motherfucking downer, is what. If it weren't for the humor on evidence throughout, it would probably be a lot less watchable, if, perhaps, no less compelling.
Curiously, however, although there is a vein of humour throughout, it never laughs at its subject, never displays anything less than utmost compassion towards these folks, however crazy or bizarre they may appear. Unlike the films of, say, that producer fella (with the exception of The Elephant Man and, by all accounts, The Straight Story), it exhibits a warmth, an empathy, rather than just inviting the viewers to participate in the mockery of these fragile, maladjusted people.
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