[6]
Director Harmony Korine (Julien Donkey-Boy, Spring Breakers) hit the indie film scene with Gummo, a film that combines scripted material with documentary footage to deliver a portrait of a tornado-stricken Ohio town whose children all seem to be circling the drain. The most featured characters include two boys (Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton) who spend their days huffing glue, killing feral cats, and having sex with a mentally disabled young woman. They’re threatened by a rival cat killer — a twelve-year-old transvestite who cares for his comatose grandmother. Three sisters (including Chloe Sevigny) take care of a pregnant pet cat — always in danger of being shot by the boys — while practicing to become strippers. The most puzzling character is a boy in shorts and rabbit ears (Jacob Sewell) who wanders town and serves as a sort of mute muse for the audience.
Korine cast a small handful of professional actors, but most of the people in Gummo are non-actors. Their natural performances and Korine’s frequent intercutting of spontaneous, documentary-like moments gives Gummo a compelling cinéma vérité feel. But if the film has any message or meaning, it’s only a statement of how backwards and doomed impoverished neighborhoods in middle-America are. The deranged and disgusting characters live in squalor with nihilistic views that stunt any possible escape from it. If you can stomach the content (cat lovers are especially warned), Gummo is remarkable filmmaking. For everyone else, Korine’s depiction of retrograde human depravity may be too unsetting to endure.