October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997) as the worst film of the year. No conceivable competition will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Mr. Korine’s debut feature. Turned loose with a camera and the Emperor’s new clothes, the writer of the vastly better Kids creates an aimless vision of Midwestern teen-age anomie, complete with drugs, garbage, dead cats and neat tricks like turning off Granny’s respirator. When it comes to boy wonders exploring the cutting edge of independent cinema, the buck stops cold right here
To be sure, Gummo has its champions: the director Gus Van Sant has described it as ”an antic fried chicken wing,” equated Mr. Korine with Tiger Woods, lauded the film’s ”sophisticated and refined cinematic dialogue of modern cultural influences” and expressed his own wish to make a film this good, although (with the exception of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) he has made nothing but better ones. Let’s just say that viewers lured to Gummo by its intensive grunge and would-be creative audacity deserve what they get.
At the start of Gummo, Mr. Korine accomplishes the rare feat of showing the worst of his hand within 30 seconds. Little kids spout obscenities in voice-over; cinematography (by the estimable Jean Yves Escoffier, who has worked with Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader) is skittishly high-speed and hand-held and grainy; talk of a tornado hitting Xenia, Ohio, never manages to be poetically trenchant. (”I saw a girl flyin’ through the sky and I looked up her skirt.”) It won’t be long before Bunny Boy, a character wandering through the film in grimy shorts and pink fluffy rabbit ears, is seen on a trash-strewn bridge, spitting and urinating on the highway below in silent protest.
Against what? Well, start by blaming the tornado and imagining the post-apocalyptic home movie hell in which Gummo unfolds. Mr. Korine casts nonprofessional actors, often freakish individuals whom the film flaunts contemptuously, like the simple-minded woman who treats a doll as her baby or the albino cook who proudly names Pamela Anderson and Patrick Swayze as her favorite movie stars. Not to mention the chubby, painted, dim housewife who is sold by her husband (Max Perlich) as a prostitute to very young boys. The lads earn the money for this by killing cats and selling the corpses to a restaurant supplier.
Mr. Korine has dreamed up these details and assembled his performers, but further directorial instruction does not apparently extend beyond asking the cast to conserve about a year’s worth of laundry and litter. No cockroach wrangler was needed for Gummo: Mr. Korine just shot the film on genuinely filthy sets.
Dirt is no crime, but willful stupidity should be. Gummo wallows so indulgently in the lives of its dead-ended characters that it shows none of the tough pathos behind ”Kids,” and not even the stylish, satirical decadence that has made a teen idol of Oliver Stone. Instead, it remains fully immersed in the numbness of its two principals, Tummler (Nick Sutton, whose star was born on a drug prevention episode of ”The Sally Jessy Raphael Show”) and Solomon. The latter is played by Jacob Reynolds, whose odd hangdog face has a precocious gravitas and who is one of the few performers here to emerge unscathed.
Among the boys’ exploits is a visit to the home of their competitor in cat killing, where they arrive wearing fright masks and armed with golf clubs. They discover a cache of transvestite photos of the other boy. This is one of many ways the film loudly (and with no real dramatic purpose) vents its bigotry about gays and blacks. Then they find his comatose grandmother, who is breathing on a respirator, and exchange the following thoughts: ”Is she dead?” ”She’s alive on that machine.” ”She stinks.” ”Her life is over.” ”She smells like baked ham.” ”She’s dead as hell. Go over and shoot her in the foot. Try and wake her up: shoot her in the foot.”
The respirator is turned off. ”She’ll be dead now,” Solomon says. Tummler strokes the grandmother’s hair gently. ”She’s always been dead,” says he. Too bad for Granny, but look on the bright side: she does get to miss the rest of the movie.
Among the better-known names attached to small roles in Gummo are Linda Manz of ”Days of Heaven,” who plays Solomon’s mother, tap dances and jokingly threatens to shoot him in the head for not smiling, and Chloe Sevigny of Kids as one of two tawdry blond sisters who love their pet cat. Ms. Sevigny is also credited with the ragged thrift-shop costumes that enhance the film’s bleak, grimy look.
Thanks to occasional nudity, frequent profanity, glue-sniffing, dead pets and so on, Gummo has the NC-17 rating (No one under 17 is admitted) it richly deserves.
Review courtesy of The New York Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u7UG6n5100
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