DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITER
Harmony
Korine
PRODUCER
Cary Woods
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Jean-Yves Escoffier
EDITOR
Christopher Tellefsen
CAST
Jacob Reynolds (Solomon)
Nick Sutton (Tummler)
Jacob Sewell (Bunny Boy)
Chloe Sevigny (Dot)
Linda Manz (Solomon's Mom)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 89m
U.S. release: October 17, 1997
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Harmony
Korine films
reviewed on this website:
- Kids
(written by Korine)
|
When
Harmony Korine's Gummo started creeping into theaters
last October, it was greeted with the sort of critical violence
that always makes me want to see the movie for myself. Sometimes
a universally hated film is universally hated for a reason, and
I've gotten stung at such movies as Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues and North. But other such
despised movies, like Crash
and A
Life Less Ordinary, made me wonder if the entirety of
American critics had seen the same film I saw. We say
we want something different, and yet when a film actually gives
us that, we punish it, mock it, call it pretentious and pointless.
My honest opinion? I liked Gummo. That surprised me, since
I'm not a big fan of Kids,
the overhyped 1995 film that Harmony Korine wrote (Larry Clark
directed it). Kids tried to be an old-fashioned cautionary
tale dressed up in new-shit hipster clothes; the result was a
shrewdly posturing work -- a film that young urban moviegoers
could attend and pretend they'd walked on the wild side. Gummo,
which Korine wrote and directed, is closer to the real thing.
If it were a documentary, Korine would be hoisted up there alongside
Errol Morris and Terry Zwigoff as a filmmaker who captured the
chaos of inner life. Because it's fiction, Korine is denounced
as an exploitative brat with a camera.
What's really going on here? Seems to me a lot of urban baby-boomer
critics have a knee-jerk aversion to any work that shows poverty-stricken
rural people but doesn't serve up a clearcut uplifting message
(banks are bad, farms are good, the community will always pull
together, etc.). Gummo is set in Xenia, Ohio, a town that
never recovered from a tornado. (It was shot in Nashville, though.)
The two main characters are Tummler (Nick Sutton) and Solomon
(Jacob Reynolds), two aimless kids who kill cats so they can
sell them for meat and buy glue to huff. Korine regards them
neutrally, without comment, and he treats everyone else onscreen
the same way. That this is condemned as condescension, and not
merely depiction, shows the condescension of the critics -- the
same well-to-do critics who hate Jerry Springer because
its guests are supposedly too ignorant (i.e., too small-town)
to know they're being exploited.
Working with cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier (Good Will
Hunting), Korine sustains a depressive mood, a world of muted
colors and no expectations, a place where entertainment consists
of watching two men beat up a kitchen chair. Some may ask why
we'd want to watch such things. Me, I think it's a relief. When
a film like Crash or Gummo comes along that's so
not Hollywood, so not about cute people with cute flaws and happy
endings, we Americans, who claim to be sick of the same action
movies and romantic comedies, have the gall to complain that
movies like Gummo have no story. Well, the non-story in
Gummo interested me a hell of a lot more than the non-stories
that Hollywood passes off as stories.
And Korine is a far more inventive visual filmmaker than his
one-time director (and photographer) Larry Clark ever was. That
famous shot of Jacob Reynolds eating spaghetti in a tub full
of gray bathwater puts a slippery finger on a part of your brain
that usually isn't touched. The movie is full of such bothersome,
elusive images (a kid with pink bunny ears strolling across a
bleak landscape; a retarded woman shaving her eyebrows; two skinheads
pummeling each other -- for real; the sight of Out of the
Blue's Linda Manz as Solomon's weird, tap-dancing mom). Directors
have been hailed as visionaries for less. In fact, if Gummo
had subtitles and came from, say, the Netherlands or Spain, some
of the same critics who shat all over it might have embraced
it.
There's also a hidden compassion in Gummo -- the movie's
dirty little secret is that it's not as coldly hip as it lets
on. The notorious scene in which Solomon shoots the comatose
old woman in the foot is actually rather ambiguous: this is their
hapless attempt to wake her up. Another scene that drew critical
fire -- Korine's cameo as a drunk guy who comes on to an encephalitic
black dwarf after talking about how lonely he is -- struck me
as oddly moving. Can we just not deal with movies that don't
express emotions the same old way? Can't we, for just 90 minutes,
rise to the challenge of genuinely difficult art?
Your reaction to the people in Gummo says more about you
than it does about them or Korine. If you recoil or laugh or
scoff, you should ask yourself why. Perhaps the comatose old
woman is Korine's metaphor for the lazy, narrow-minded, unadventurous
American audience that he hopes to wake up. Most critics have
rewarded him with a kick in the ass, but they should be thanking
him. Better he should make Lost
in Space? I'm reminded of a great quote by Spike Lee:
when an interviewer said that Spike's use of different styles
in the same movie isn't what some people are used to, Lee retorted,
"Most of the movies that people are used to suck anyway!"
A sentiment with which, I think, Harmony Korine would heartily
agree. |