CRITIC ESSAY
GUMMO 1997
35%
Written and directed by Harmony Korine
Starring Jacob Sewell, Nick Sutton, Jacob Reynolds, Chloë Sevigny
Although 2012’s Spring Breakers may have introduced new fans to Harmony Korine’s unique combination of rebellious posturing and poignant imagery, Gummo got there a long time ago. Reviled at the time of its release, the movie has been validated with time and provides an essential backdrop to the inspired wackiness that Korine had in store. While Spring Breakers gangster Alien mused “Look at all my shit!” as a defiant celebration of his material goods, Gummo digs into the exuberant lives of people with nothing left.
It’s also a beautiful mess, loaded with macabre and disturbing tangents designed to make viewers uncomfortable and maybe even a bit restless. Believe it or not, this controversial portrait of a small town and its eccentric locals has sincerity buried beneath its prankish surface. When it hit theaters in 1997, many critics found Gummo appalling, in part because they had never been exposed to the reckless oddballs it portrayed and considered them crass exaggerations. Many reviews ragged on the movie for gawking at lost souls. But who was really gawking? Gummo is a magical portrait of people living on the margins of society and displays a striking willingness to empathize with their insular existence.
Fifteen years before Korine’s candy-colored Florida odyssey Spring Breakers, the screenwriter’s directorial debut unleashed an extraordinary collage of diverse people enmeshed in surreal activities as they moved aimlessly through some ruined corner of a broken world. Nashville stands in for the film’s setting of Xenia, Ohio, but it’s really Anytown, USA.
While Korine’s Kids script stood out for its realistic depiction of raunchy New York teens, Gummo depicts the same kind of outsider energy with a more liberating, scattershot approach. The result is an immersive mashup of heavy-metal samples and operatic rock, sloppy vaudeville performances, and meandering riffs on sexuality, race, even death. The movie careens from one offbeat moment to the next, as if cycling through social media clips all captured in the same distinctive locale. The director’s lush depiction of colorful outsiders, with faces and attitudes unfamiliar in much of American cinema, has accrued more value as the country wakes up to its many underrepresented people. No matter how much it was shunned upon its release, Gummo was ahead of its time.
Korine does his part to orient viewers up top. The soft-spoken teen Solomon (Jacob Reynolds) recalls the destructive impact of a tornado that tore the town to bits; in its wake, weary young locals wander through the wreckage with casual indifference, as if liberated from the constraints of an adult society that left them behind. From there, Gummo barrels through a series of vignettes, some more fleshed out than others, assembled in a naturalistic setting tinged with absurdist flourishes.
These mini-adventures are alternately mesmerizing, tiresome, and transcendent—but also rich with sociological implications. Disaffected kids Solomon and his pal Tummler (Nick Sutton) roam the landscape with BB guns, casually murdering cats around the neighborhood and selling them to a local Chinese restaurant; elsewhere, a trio of sisters (including rising star Chloë Sevigny, Korine’s girlfriend at the time) goof around in their bedroom and later deter the advances of a local pedophile; and a group of burly white men engage in drunken arm-wrestling, but the strongest of them finds himself defeated by the African American little person with whom they’re hanging out! Each instance hints at intriguing ideas about the nature of these characters and the conditions that seem to mandate their behavior.
Korine could have been guilty of crude exploitation if the movie didn’t exhibit a blatant affection for its ensemble. In one potentially upsetting moment, a man pimps his mentally handicapped sister to Solomon and Tummler, but rather than building to a grotesque punchline, Korine arrives at an unexpectedly sweet encounter between the scrawny, wide-eyed Tummler and the unnamed woman as they lock eyes and exchange pleasantries. The sordid conditions lead to the unexpected glimmer of warmth.
The wandering voiceover often lands on captivating observations. “I knew a guy who was dyslexic, but he was also cross-eyed, so everything came out right,” muses Tummler, and the memorable line becomes the movie’s mission statement. Watching Gummo is like gazing at a Magic Eye Puzzle: disorienting and inscrutable at first, until its underlying significance comes into focus. By the time it arrives at a dizzying conclusive montage, set to Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” Korine has invented a fresh rhythm for expressing the complex emotions at the center of each frame.
The movie’s central figure doesn’t say a word, but he’s a visual for the ages: a young boy (Jacob Sewell) wearing giant pink bunny ears stumbles across grimy parking lots and peers at traffic from a nondescript bridge. In one beguiling sequence, he lazily toys with an accordion while sitting on the toilet. As the movie veers from one vignette to the next, it often returns to this silent witness, as he becomes a kind of mute Greek chorus for the movie’s central motifs. With time, the Bunny Boy has become an iconic embodiment of America’s grittier counterculture, at once eager to stand out in the crowd and exiled by the so-called adults in the room. (More than one Gummo acolyte sports a Bunny Boy tattoo; find them on Instagram.)
Despite its somber atmosphere, Gummo isn’t afraid to have fun. In one of the movie’s more endearing sequences, an energetic widow (the great Linda Manz) digs out her late husband’s tap shoes and dances around her scrawny son while he attempts an exuberant workout routine with silverware. Later, she feeds him a messy plate of pasta while he sits in the bathtub. It’s no wonder the sequence won over director Werner Herzog, who became a rare Gummo superfan at the time of its release: the movie feels like a spiritual cousin to the idiosyncratic character studies that define Herzog’s earlier work (particularly Even Dwarves Started Small) more than anything in the American movie scene that found Gummo so off-putting when it emerged.
Alternately tragic, hilarious, and profound, Gummo is a transformative attempt to mine ingenuity from a medium that so often sags into conventionality. Korine’s freewheeling assemblage of everyday malaise and rambunctious behavior encourages you to cringe, then contemplate the impulse behind that very response. It’s a timeless lesson about tolerance dressed up in bad-boy clothing, and it only grows wiser with age.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus Gummo’s bold provocations may impress more iconoclastically inclined viewers, but others will find it hard to see past Harmony Korine’s overwhelmingly sour storytelling perspective.