Gummo

I will admit that the reason I rented this movie was because of the numerous reviews that I read about how unbelievably bad and pointless this film was. It only took me a few minutes to realize why so many critics hated it, which was the very reason I liked this film.

Gummo is a classic case of style over substance. If you're looking for plot development, you'd better go rent Good Will Hunting or something like that. But if you want to see a movie that is cutting-edge and well ahead of its time, then rent this one. I praise the director for simply doing something different.

What impressed me the most about this film was the framing of one memorable image after another. I think Director Korine was trying to leave people with impressions and feelings. Whether you like this film or not, its impossible to forget. Plus, this film has what I think is one of the greatest lines in recent movie history. A little girl, holding a picture of Burt Reynolds with the mouth ripped out, chants incessantly, "I want a moustache, dammit!"

This movie is worth the three bucks to rent it if nothing more than to see the scene where a fat redneck takes out his aggression on a kitchen chair while his friends cheer him on. It's more frightening than anything in the Scream series.

Set in Xenia, Ohio, Gummo feels like a deliberate riposte to Hollywood by its creator, Harmony Korine, whose penchant for subversion was already evident in his screen writing debut for Larry Clark's Kids (1995). Eschewing linear narrative, Korine explores, through the use of vignettes and bizarre episodes, the cat-killing escapades of its two protagonists and weaves this quest around a set of unrelated but bizarre events taking place in Xenia. There is no sense of a story, only a mood, and that mood fluctuates wildly from revulsion to surprise. By giving voice to those marginalized from society, Korine paints a startling portrait of landlocked America, one at odds with the Hollywood cliché of its inhabitants. There are many unforgettable scenes and yet it's not an enjoyable film, but it challenges, provokes and pushes the margins - and that in itself is worthy.

Gummo is a nonlinear narrative centered around the residents of Xenia, Ohio. After a tornado devastated their town the surviving residents pass the time by any sadistic means possible. A long day of feral cat hunting ends with a brief discussion of crème brûlée before a session of glue huffing, followed by a visit to a local prostitute suffering from Down Syndrome. It's as if Deliverance and Apocalypse Now had a child, abused it, and left it to its own devices. Horrifying is a word that comes to mind when attempting to evaluate this film. Drunken chair-wrestling, random acts of molestation, and casual conversations ranging in topics from cat burnings to their general dislike of African Americans are pretty typical. The only thing more trash filled, filthy, and septic then their homes, is their gene pool. Life in rural Ohio has never seemed so nihilistic. Though disturbing, I found this to be a quietly beautiful film. Both hyper-real and utterly surreal, it's stylized aesthetic is perfectly suited for the subject and premise. Rich symbolism and unforgettable images demand ones attention in an unrelenting assault on the Status Que. Unsettling and humbling, we are given a glimpse of inbred Americana straddling the border of malignant sadism and total insanity. The story telling style of Harmony Korine reminds me of the work of Terrence Malick, with the addition of a little incest.

Harmony Korine did this when he was 24 years old and everything else aside I like it a lot that a young person gets to tell us what it can be to be young. Irrespective of whether or not a young man has yet found something important to say at 24, I don't like it that professional directors' careers start well into their thirties. There's a big age gap there that is only talked about in hindsight, after the fact. Perspectives and values change as we grow older, whether or not a young man will mature to the point of recognizing the follies and dreams of his youth or he'll embrace the anger and grow up to be GG Allin, and whether or not settling down to a regular life is a personal betrayal of a former self, I think something like Gummo needs to be made and more of it.

This is punk filmmaking at its scummiest, the vibe of antisocial angst despair and anger is pure necro punk rock like GG Allin throwing feces at his audience and smashing beer cans open on his head, it's about being violent and eccentric right now as a means of killing time and making something out of tearing down something else. Yet it's also oddly poetic for the same reason. It's not poetic because a kid will eat spaghetti and chocolate in the bathtub or because a kid with bunny ears rides his bike around a post-apocalyptic landscape of trailerpark white trash, but more because it assumes important things can be said through all this. When Korine speaks of life and death, whether or not life is worth living, when he attakcs society as complacent and apathetic, the results feel immature to me: this is reaction from a vantage point of being too young to start caring, an act of vandalism from the safe point of having your own thing wrecked. But it's good to have these things captured on film then thrown away for anyone who might wanna find them.

I read a bit about Trash Humpers and it seems Harmony Korine doesn't feel there's anything to grow out of. Watching him in his Letterman interviews gives me a clue to all this: the guy is awkward but he's cute awkward, the kind of awkward women want to hold in their arms. I know a skater guy like this, he's 30 years old but looks 25, has his face pierced and hair colored blue or magenta for as long as I've known him, and is endearingly weird. He's never had a shortage of girlfriends. He reminds me of Gummo where despair and malaise plays like a sort of lifestyle. Real awkward people, people who really can't get anywhere in life, don't make movies. I'd like to see their Gummos, this is a bit too cute.

After every scene you have to ask "what in the flying f--- am I watching?" It IS unique art though and deserves some stars for that. Absurd to the nth degree with no particular plot or story line. Much of it could be described as hilariously entertaining in the same disturbing way that watching two dogs fight over a chicken bone could be. I laughed my a-- off through most of it, but near the end it got sad. You start to feel guilty for mocking these miserable people. But, mostly you come away asking "why do people reproduce?" and wonder how much better this planet would be without us abysmal creatures running around wrecking the place.