(1997)
3
Brian J. Dillard
Although it's not for the weak of heart or the easily offended, this bizarre offering from precocious auteur Harmony Korine certainly is amusing and disturbing in equal measures. Say what you will about a hipster New York director wallowing in the go-nowhere lives of a bunch of dirt-poor rural teens, but these disjointed vignettes have both a traffic-accident magnetism and a surreal beauty. Korine spent part of his childhood in Nashville, near where Gummo was filmed, and his stylistic choices here blur the distinctions between documentary, improvisation, and fictional filmmaking. It's hard to know how to take some of this stuff; the writer/director exerts no discernible point of view beyond a hint of detached amusement. But the film's uncertainty is precisely what makes it so refreshingly honest. The sheer crassness of some of the scenarios -- a boy discovering a lump in the breast of the girl he's feeling up, a retarded teen turning tricks while her brother/pimp tweaks his nipples, and Korine himself jokily propositioning a gay African-American dwarf while recounting tales of being sodomized as a child -- may rankle. The absurd humor and outré imagery, however, should go over well with the urban sophisticates at whom the film is pitched. Korine's muse, Chloe Sevigny, turns in the most indelible of her many white-trash chic performances, trumping even her celebrated role in Boys Don't Cry. Meanwhile, newcomers Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, and Jacob Sewell, among others, make quite an impression with their vérité-tinged performances. Character actor Max Perlich enjoys a brief but memorable cameo, while Days of Heaven actress Linda Manz provides a hilarious tap dancing lesson and a few wonderful maternal harangues. Whether all of this adds up to much is for the viewer to decide, but for adventurous cinephiles, Gummo certainly offered up one of the least-predictable American indies of the late '90s.
cast-crew for Gummo on AllMovie
Gummo (1997)
