User Reviews

I did sit through the entire showing, and I did hope it would get better. Sadly, the film languished until the sweet release of the final credits.

There is nothing to make the viewer care about the characters. There is nothing to create sympathy in the viewer regarding the troubled world of Xenia, at least as it is portrayed in the film.

The only character who appears "wholesome" in the film is really a pervert; he molests a young woman in front of her sisters, but even then I didn't care. By this stage of the film, I ought to have some emotional investment, but I honestly felt apathy toward the scene... it ought to have roused anger or indignation, but I found myself sighing and looking at my watch. When the viewer cannot establish any emotional connection to any of the characters, this is indicative of poor story structure and poor film making.

Is this art? No; art follows a structure. When the director throws conventional plot structure and character development out the window, what the director has made is a poor Youtube video. This experience is similar to watching a child destroy a toy while his mother remarks "see how creative he is".

In the first minute of the film, a cat is picked up by the neck and is drowned in a garbage can of water, a scene which sets the tone for much of what is to come in director Harmony Korine's debut feature. The reviews about Gummo tend to center on the sideshow that is the grotesque nature of the film's imagery. There can be no doubt that Korine has set out to shock and horrify his audience, but if you can get past the almost violent nature of the repulsive imagery, there is a lot of meat left on Gummo's bones. Gummo may not be a masterpiece and it's certainly not for everyone, but at its core it's an effective and poignant meditation on life, death, and various forms of alienation which cause some to live as though they aren't really alive in the first place.

Gummo is a series of dark sketches which focus mainly on the young inhabitants of Xenia, OH, a town that we are told has been devastated by a tornado some years earlier. The inhabitants of the town are not going to win any beauty contests. The boys of the town are personified mainly in Tummler (Nick Sutton), skinny and hickish in his features and Tummler's best friend, the shockingly bizarre looking (almost grotesque) Solomon (Jacob Reynolds). The women of the town are represented mainly by three sisters. There is Dot (Chloe Sevigny), a woman who might be beautiful if it weren't for her disastrously frayed and freakishly blonde hair and eyebrows and her two sisters, one a shorter, uglier and more inbred looking blonde and the other a young brunette child.

The boys listlessly drift through their days, killing cats in order to sell them. When they do have money in their hands they fund various forms of debauchery from huffing glue to paying to have sex with retarded women. In one of the scene's more poignant moments, Tummler and Solomon break into the house of a rival cat-killer and discover his grandma in a bed, kept alive by a respirator. Solomon asks Tummler if she will ever wake up, and we get the sense that Solomon is really asking if they will ever wake up. If they will ever wake up and live different lives, where they didn't list through life high on glue, where they were loved and "normal." Tummler's answer is a quick, dismissive "hell no" and he pulls the plug on the old woman as the two walk out.

The females on the other hand obsess mainly about the same things you would expect young women to obsess about, boys, their looks, and finding their lost cat. Yet they too are reminded how little the world thinks of them when an old man cons the women into getting in his car and then improperly touches one of the sisters. As he drives off, he repeatedly says to the women "nothing new for trash like you." Unlike Tummler and Solomon, the sisters are possessed by a human spirit that is keenly alive. However, in the end they wind up as isolated and alienated from society and normalcy as the boys.

And that is really the core of Gummo—an exploration at the ways we become alienated from life during our formative years. One by one the film displays dysfunctional family systems, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, degrading sexual behavior, violence, illness and ugliness. Each scene further isolates the characters that inhabit the world of Gummo. Each scene sucks a little bit of life out of its already lifeless characters. In the end, we are left with the film's most haunting and memorable scene-- Solomon, bathing in impossibly dirty bath water while his mom serves him grotesque looking servings of spaghetti and strawberry milk. This is oddly perhaps the most inhuman scene of the movie (which is saying a lot considering as already mentioned there are some other pretty disturbing scenes) and serves as a perfect metaphor for the alienation from humanity that Gummo's inhabitants feel. They don't' just feel it, they bathe in it, it surrounds them, it is their reality.

This is one of those films you actually have to want to see, and I think it deserves a repeat viewing. Having said that, Gummo is definitely not the kind of film you'd sit down and watch with the girlfriend.

Basically, it consists of disjointed vignettes of life in a tornado- devastated hick town. The characters can best be described as white trash. Our two central characters go around killing cats and selling them to a guy who's going to ensure the felines end up in fast food, among other activities. These two boys resemble Beavis and Butt-Head, but with more nihilism and existential pointlessness. The scenes of chair-wrestling rednecks and a waifish boy wearing only floppy rabbit ears, shorts and tennis shoes add some sort of bleak hopelessness to the film as we also get glimpses into porch conversations that have an un- scripted feel to them. Overall, this film isn't easy to watch but is somehow strangely compelling and examines poverty, boredom and pointless small town existence without either romanticising or offering any hope for the future.

**possible spoilers**

After penning the screenplay for Larry Clark's controversial "Kids," Harmony Korine attracted instant notoriety before he was even out of his teens. It wasn't long before he negotiated a deal with the same producer to finance his own film as director. That film, known as "Gummo," attracted equal controversy in its own way--and is arguably even more grotesque in content. There is next to no plot to speak of. It's a group of loose vignettes about white trash in a crumbling, forgotten Ohio town (though it was actually filmed in Nashville). The film is intent on offending the sensitive viewer from the start, with a boy in a bunny hat urinating on traffic from a bridge. Two other boys hunt down cats to sell to the local supermarket. A man prostitutes his wife to local teens. A retarded girl runs around and sings for no apparent reason. Korine himself appears as a gay man making drunken advances at a dwarf. At the very end, there is an utterly disgusting scene that seems to have been put there simply for shock value. There's no point to any of this, and the more I think about it the more I am convinced that the filmmakers had no idea where they were going with the material. They seem to have thrown in these unpleasant things just to distract us from that fact. The film wanders aimlessly (like the characters), then it's just over.

I wonder what the actors thought of performing these scenes. Surely they didn't intend to make a bad film. They must have trusted the director to make sense of it all, but that may be an impossible task. Most of the performers are nonactors, as Korine intended to give the film a documentary-like feel. No problem there, but often he just sticks them in front of the camera and makes them act stupid. The most curious bit of casting must be Jacob Reynolds, as a very odd-looking teen with a short body and a long, oversized head. I'm not praising his performance or anything; he just stands out because he looks so weird. According to an interview, Korine cast him due to his performance in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial. His co-star, Nick Sutton, was selected after an appearance on "Sally Jesse Raphael" when he announced his glue-sniffing habits on national television. Judging from the film, the production crew seems to have been inspired to take up this habit. The only performer I remotely liked was Chloë Sevigny as a bored young woman, but I suspect she only agreed to appear in this thing because she was dating the director.

Very little in "Gummo" works, though the cinematography does have some merit. This must also be one of the most pretentious films I've seen. Korine claims to have been devising a new and improved form of filmmaking art. Does he really believe that, or is he just posturing to hide his lack of any real creative talent? I hope he's just inexperienced. Roger Ebert's positive review of his next film, "Julien Donkey-Boy," does suggest this. I'd like to think he can refine his techniques over time. If that is the case, I am willing to give him another chance. In the meantime, I'd recommend another film, "Boys Don't Cry." It had similar settings and characters--including one played by Chloë Sevigny--but it was a much more compelling film that offered genuine insight into its ill-fated characters. In contrast, "Gummo" fails to enlighten or inspire. Its creator would have you regard it as an "art film." And so it is. A bad art film. At least it tries to be something different and unique though.

*1/2 (out of ****)

Released by Fine Line Features

If you've never lived in a small midwestern town (predominately white, predominately poor) then I suppose that the immediate power of this film would be lost on you, though it's really not that hard to translate the myriad of sick and twisted characters in Gummo to whatever community you live in. I have been a poor white person my entire life and although I've never come across a retarded girl being pimped out by her brother or a pair of kids killing cats to sell to a Chinese joint for meat, I have cut through the back yards and sat beneath the windows of the buildings where these kinds of things may very well have happened. They most likely didn't, of course. But they just might have...

Gummo is a look at things that just might be. What Might Be going on down the street. What horrible secrets Might your neighbors Be hiding? We all play this game; we think of the worst things that people might do, and we hope, in a sick way, that they might actually be doing them.

"Old Man Johnson, with the hook for the hand? You know he got that hook reaching into the woman's bathroom in the school, some girl took a knife and just cut it off." "The guy across the street, and I heard this from Judy who is friends with his ex-wife, she says that he used to dress up like a clown and give out candy, but one day he was caught with this little kid, doing stuff. What you mean, what kind of stuff. Dirty stuff, you know." Sometimes these displays are ridiculous and funny, sometimes they're disgusting, and sometimes they're truly horrible, but they are always enthralling. Gummo is a series of these displays.

No, there isn't a cohesive plot and I know that more than a few simple film goers will be genuinely confused and possibly even angered by this point (I might suggest that these people go watch some Buñuel, or at least try not to have such a narrow conception of film). Gummo really acts more like a portrait than a traditional film, playing on the viewer's emotions through characters instead of plot.

There are no social or political implications to Gummo, which may lead to the mistaken but commonly-held belief that this is somehow an exploitation film. This is not a story of a town in need of a savior that will not come or even of problems that need to be solved. The lack of narrative ensures a lack of message: this is a neither a criticism nor a sympathetic portrait. It's a raw feed, without morals, and it's shot and acted so realistically that it might seem as if Korine were shoot a faux-documentary. The characters are just exaggerations of people that you may have come across, characters that you've already created--the ADD boy who plays tennis and has the world's coolest mullet, the young girls who put electric tape on their nipples to make them perkier, the creepy little glue-sniffing boys who murder housecats and pay to sleep with a retarded girl. These aren't real people and Korine doesn't want you to think that they are. They are merely what we've always thought our neighbors capable of and we've always, in a sick way, almost wanted to believe. Why else would urban legends stick around so long? Why else is most disgusting gossip usually the most interesting? Gummo gives us all what we want, unflinchingly, and doesn't ask to be thanked.

What can I say?? This movie isn't for everyone. It doesn't have much of a plot nor any decent characters. It's a major train wreck, it doesn't feel right watching an accident happen but you just can't take your eyes of it. It's kinda making fun of a mentally challenged person..you know it's not right but you can't help yourself.

A lot of the movie leaves the audience filling in the blank. If you like movies that are like this ....then go for it. If your a sane person and are watching the movie, you constantly find yourself asking "why the heck are they (characters)doing that?". For example, two of the main characters (kids/teeneagers)kill cats to make money. Not only do they kill the poor cats, they actually torture them. Then they take the money that they make selling the cats (didn't get why the grocery manager will want to buy them except to sell them to people and pretend its meat...ewww)and go sleep with a prostitute. In another scene, two boys "kill" and name call another boy with rabbit ears on. It's sad. Not only is it said, it shows how naive, stupid people can be. I couldn't believe those grown up teenagers got in the car with the creepy old guy. Hello??? Clearly they aren't thinking. If you think the kids are bad, wait until you meet the adults. Getting drunk and punching the s*it out of a chair isn't my idea of fun.

In a way, I can see that a lot of people can read into the movie. They can say it addresses discrimination, hate, self-confidence, love, hope and loss. For each viewer it's different. It doesn't really open your eyes to the issues but it puts it in front of you and if your smart/observant enough , you will see it. For me, it's just shows a very sad lifestyle of people who live differently than me.

I must say I was pretty shocked when I first saw this film. I grew up in various small towns in Oklahoma and have encountered people very similar to those portrayed in the movie. It was like going back in time and seeing all those twisted characters all over again. So yes, there are indeed people just like this, if not worse. I had to convince myself several times that I was NOT watching a documentary! I found that the use of raw black metal music added to the grim feel of the movie, particularly when the two kids are whipping the dead cat hanging from the tree. Hey, if you've never seen bored Southern youth, then don't think this stuff doesn't happen. I only wish it didn't.

Overall, I guess you'd have to actually be a witness to those surroundings to actually get it, or to know people like that. I am unsure of what statement the movie is trying to make because the absurdity of the characters' lifestyles really overshadows whatever point Harvey was trying make here. Much like 'Salo: 120 Days of Sodom', I would only recommend this to film buffs.