Terry Zwigoff's documentary on underground cartoonist R. (for Robert) Crumb is an interesting movie, but not really very interesting as a movie. Zwigoff's chief gift as a filmmaker -- an entitlement as distinct from a talent, a thing handed him on a silver platter -- is that of access. A friend of Crumb's for a quarter-century, he is allowed to follow the cartoonist, with camera and microphone, throughout the preparations for the latter's move to France ("slightly less evil than the United States"), together with his second wife and their daughter. The itinerary includes Crumb's ex-wife and ex-girlfriends, a son from the first marriage, two brothers -- especially them -- and their mutual mother. Generally steering a course somewhere between formal interviews and unstaged scenes (major exception: a photo shoot for a skin magazine at which Crumb happily plays the fool among, as they say, a bevy of beauties), the movie traffics for the most part in forced, self-conscious musings and mutterings, not too dissimilar to the yield of countless camcorders in households across the land. It provides, even so, a conspectus of Crumb's work as well as a colloquium on it; and it achieves a common goal in creative endeavors, that of delineating a set of characters, a central character, a particular world, milieu, lifestyle, sensibility. If there's not a lot of cinematic interest in it, there's never a shortage of other sorts of interests to keep you occupied: artistic, psychological, familial, social, sexual. (1995) — Duncan Shepherd
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