Cobb movie review & film summary (1994)

Its problem, indeed, is that it doesn't know what to do with Stump in the first place. Cobb is a magnificently evil and deranged character, ranting and raving, shooting bullet holes through walls and ceilings, making a public nuisance of himself, crashing automobiles, disrupting meetings, and participating in an ugly sexual assault at gunpoint. He has been deeply damaged, and we find out why as the story gradually emerges about the death of his father - who was killed by Cobb's mother, or maybe by her lover, or just perhaps (I would hazard) by Cobb himself.

Cobb wants Stump to put only the good stuff in his book, and so he conceals many of the seamy details. To work them into the movie Shelton hits on the clever idea of a newsreel about Cobb's life. We see it at the beginning of the film, and then it's played again at a Hall of Fame dinner in his honor - only this time, the drunken Cobb hallucinates that the newsreel is showing what really happened, and so we see the murder, the scandals, the domestic violence, the misery.

Cobb is there, in the round, and convincing. Oliver Cromwell once urged a painter to make an honest portrait, "warts and everything," and "Cobb" makes its hero look like all warts, with a batting average attached. Cobb is fine. The movie's weakness is that it gives Stump no place to go, no way to develop.

Awestruck by Cobb's greatness, he puts up with drunken rages and violent escapades like a battered wife. As their odyssey takes them from state to state, they fall into almost a domestic arrangement: Stump as biographer, chauffeur, stenographer and nurse, "the only thing keeping the bastard alive," occasionally making shrill threats to leave, but never following through on them. Does he learn anything? Served with divorce papers, he pulls a gun on the process server and puts some bullets through the walls, emulating his hero.

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