I, Curmudgeon By Jeet Heer National Post (April 29, 2004) Andy Rooney has been lucky enough to turn his peevishness into a career. Most Sundays at the tail end of Sixty Minutes, Rooney can be heard mumbling and grumbling about the petty irritants of life: dishonest commercials, the shrinking size of chocolate bars, the inability of his desk to stay tidy, the number of non-functional pens he owns. Although Rooney gives off a gruff grandfatherly warmth on television, he is actually the most recalcitrant person in Alan Zweig’s new documentary I, Curmudgeon. In two brief clips, we see Rooney’s prickly resistance to being interviewed. Sulking glumly in his book-lined office, Rooney wards off Zweig’s questions by pretending he can’t understand what he is being asked. Rooney, it becomes clear, is only happy in addressing the world on his own terms within the brief ambit of his weekly monologue; he can’t fit himself into someone else’s narrative. Rooney’s querulous persona is all the more striking because the other participants in Zweig’s film are also, as one might guess from the title, curmudgeons. In assembling his documentary, Zweig gathered around himself a collection of malcontents, grouches, complainers, and grudge-holders. Surprisingly, aside from Rooney, the other disgruntled souls in the film seem willing to talk about their personal lives: they may hate the world but there are happy enough to share a brief moment of fellowship with Zweig, perhaps because the director is a brother grouser. So, even among the confederacy of the damned, Rooney stands out as uniquely cantankerous. I, Curmudgeon is a continuation of the genre Zweig created in his earlier documentary Vinyl, which offered a psychological profile of record collectors. As with Vinyl, this new documentary combines personal introspection with on-camera group therapy. We can only understand a period of our life when it comes near the end. In Zweig’s case, the success of Vinyl and other projects made him realize that he had spent most of his adult life bitter at his stalled filmmaking career. As his frustration and bitterness hardened, Zweig’s personality hardened into a perpetual petulance. Now enjoying a springtime of the soul after many wintry years, Zweig has enough distance to analyze his bitterness and search out its root causes. Helping him along are other sullen personalities. Some of the cranks on display are recognizable names: the comedian Scott Thompson, authors such as Cintra Wilson and Fran Lebowitz, the autobiographical comic book writer Harvey Pekar (who had also appeared in Vinyl). But most of the people in the movie are more run-of-the mill curmudgeons. They are the types of people we run into in everyday life: the acerbic record-store clerk, the whiny office-mate, or crab sitting alone in the corner of a party. The most common problem suffered by curmudgeons turns out to be their circumscribed social life. In a culture that values the upbeat, positive thinking, anyone who has a reputation for being disgruntled quickly becomes lonely. “Negative charisma” is writer Toby Young’s description for his personal ambience. “I define negative charisma as meaning that I can walk across a crowded room in which I know one and no one knows me and already 10 people hate me,” Young notes. “ I was a fairly prototypical embittered loser for a while. It became such a source of energy that I worried that if I did achieve some modicum of success I would mellow out and lose that source of energy.” Then suddenly and disconcertingly we get a burst of Young’s energy as he starts barking like a mad-dog at the room service of his hotel. The personal and the political are mixed together in the sour brew of the curmudgeon’s personality. As Zweig notes, there are “three categories of things which made me a cranky negative, bitter person. Popular culture and all its crap, category 1. Category 2 is how my life did not go the way I wanted it to. Category 3 is man’s inhumanity to man, lack of charity, lack of kindness, lying, phoniness, cowardliness, all the stupid things done in the name of religion and patriotism, war, pestilence, violence, and mistreatment, and pollution, alienation, stupid, stupid people, all the horrible things in the world, yeah all that.” Yet among the three categories that Zweig outlines, the smaller annoyances weigh more than the bigger problems. “Though the big bad things in the world fuel my negativity here and there, the little bad things in the world are the true engine.” Zweig argues. Thus Zweig notes that he got upset watching a clip of Bob Hope telling bad jokes during the Vietnam war. “But the question is what actually actively did bother me, what on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute, moment-to-moment basis got my goat more: the war or the bad jokes Bob Hope told at the war?” Zweig asks. “I think it’s the bad Bob Hope jokes.” For a long kvetch-fest, I, Curmudgeon is extremely entertaining. The success of the documentary rests on the fact that Zweig and his tribe are all extremely articulate people: they are well practiced in voicing their discontent in the form of a sprightly anecdotes or a sharply-etched put-downs. The film illustrates how vivid insults can be more life-affirming than blowsy and insincere praise. H.L. Mencken was one of the great literary curmudgeons, always ready to flay humanity with a torrent of abusive language. “He calls you a swine and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live,” Walter Lippmann astutely noted of Mencken. The motley array of rancorous personalities in I, Curmudgeon produce a similar effect.