Gummo
| Gummo | |
|---|---|
| File:Gummoposter.png | |
| Directed by | Harmony Korine |
| Written by | Harmony Korine |
| Produced by | Cary Woods |
| Starring | Jacob Reynolds Nick Sutton Jacob Sewell Darby Dougherty Chloë Sevigny |
| Cinematography | Jean-Yves Escoffier |
| Edited by | Christopher Tellefsen |
| Distributed by | Fine Line Features |
Release date | 1997 |
Running time | 95 min. |
| Country | United States  |
| Language | English |
Gummo is a 1997 cult film written and directed by Harmony Korine. The film stars Nick Sutton and Jacob Reynolds. Rather than following a linear plot, the film is a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes depicting the lives of fictional residents of the small town of Xenia, Ohio.
Synopsis
The film is set in Xenia, Ohio, a real life small town that was hit by a tornado in 1974. The film, however, was not actually shot in Xenia. The film depicts Xenia as the home of various oddball and sometimes disturbing backwater characters. The loose narrative follows several main characters, interrupted by vignettes depicting the other denizens of the town.
The film opens with a grainy voiced narrator recounting the events of the tornado while disturbing home-movies images play — mostly of the town's people. After the narration, the credits roll over a montage of a pre-adolescent boy wearing a pair of pink bunny ears and shorts, on an overpass in the rain.
After the credit sequence, we see a cat being carried by the scruff of its neck by a teenage boy. He drowns the cat in a barrel of water. The film then cuts to a different boy, Tummler, in a wrecked car with a girl. They fondle each other, and then Tummler realizes there is a lump on one of her breasts.
Tummler and Solomon then ride down a hill on bikes. The narrator introduces Tummler as a boy with "a marvelous persona", who some people call "downright evil". Later, Tummler aims an air rifle at a cat. His friend Solomon stops him from killing the cat, protesting that it is a house cat. They leave and we see the cat go to its owner's house. The cat is owned by three sisters, two of whom are teenagers and one who is pre-pubescent.
The film cuts back to Tummler and Solomon, who are hunting feral cats. They bring the cats to a local grocer, who intends to butcher and sell them to a local restaurant, and the grocer tells them that they have a rival in the cat killing business. They then buy glue from the grocer, which they take to the woods and use to get high.
The film then cuts to a scene in which two young boys dressed as cowboys curse and destroy things in a junkyard. The boy wearing the bunny ears arrives and the other boys shoot him "dead" with cap-guns. The bunny-costumed boy either plays dead or faints, and the boys then curse him out and steal his shoes. They grow bored of messing around with him, and leave him sprawled on the ground.
Tummler and Solomon track down a local boy who is poaching "their" cats. The poacher is poisoning the cats rather than shooting them. When Tummler and Solomon break into the poacher's house, they find disturbing photos of the young teen in drag and also his elderly grandmother, who is comatose and unresponsive in a bed. The poacher is forced to care for her, which he finds disgusting. The boys turn off the grandmother's life support, saying she is "dead inside."
Also included are scenes involving a drunk man (played by Harmony Korine) flirting with a gay midget; a man prostituting his Down syndrome sister to Solomon Tummler, Dot and her sisters encountering a child molester, a pair of twins selling candy door-to-door (which they steal the money from,) the teenaged girl's conversation with a tennis player who has ADD, a drunken party chair-wrestling match, and two skinhead brothers slap-fighting. Tummler's widower father and Solomon's widowed mother are also introduced in tragic-comic scenes which also reveal Tummler's hobby writing poetry. A short interlude features blurry images of people in corpse paint engaging in some sort of ceremony involving the skull of a horned animal, possibly a goat.
Production
Most of the film was shot in Nashville, Tennessee, and most of the actors had little or no experience, among them long-time local rocker Dave Cloud. The exceptions include director Harmony Korine's long-time girlfriend Chloë Sevigny and Linda Manz. Korine himself also plays a role in the film. Sevigny was also in charge of costumes for the film, reportedly purchasing the majority of the costumes at a local thrift store to preserve authenticity. The scene in which roaches crawl out of holes in a wall was filmed in a real roach-infested Nashville home.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack features black metal bands such as Absu, Burzum, Bathory, and the German Bethlehem. Also features other metal bands like Brujería, Sleep, Eyehategod and power violence band Spazz.[1] Korine later showed interest in black metal subculture in his 2000 visual series "The Sigil Of The Cloven Hoof Marks Thy Path."
Other popular songs were used in the film, but not included on the soundtrack, such as Buddy Holly's "Everyday" and Madonna's "Like A Prayer." Also, Roy Orbison's "Crying" closes the movie, and is directly referenced in the dialog.
Response
Gummo premiered at the 24th Telluride Film Festival on August 29, 1997. During the screening, numerous people got up and left during the initial cat drowning sequence.
Werner Herzog praised the film in a conversation between himself and Harmony Korine, published in the November 1997 issue of Interview magazine. Herzog spoke of being especially moved by the bacon taped to the wall during the bathtub scene.[2]
The film's portrayal of "poor white trash" has garnered both glowing reviews and thunderous condemnations for its disturbing content and strange style, which is simultaneously hyperrealistic and surreal. In addition to drug abuse, the film covers a broad range of issues including suicide, grief, homophobia, prostitution, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, euthanasia and racism. Director Lukas Moodysson listed it as one of his top ten films for the 2002 Sight and Sound Poll and director Megan Spencer did the same for Senses of Cinema.[3][4]
Scenes from Gummo were featured in the documentary Beautiful Losers (2007) in which Harmony Korine himself is one of the film's subjects.[5].
A scene from Gummo was on the TV in the background of a scene in Hype Williams' 1998 film Belly. This was a scene in the relative beginning of the film when the DMX character (Tommy) and the Nas character (Sincere) are hanging out at Tommy's home and wake up his girlfriend making her angry.
References
- ^ "Gummo - Original Soundtrack". Allmusic. Retrieved 2008-02-18.
- ^ Fine Line Features | Gummo
- ^ BFI | Sight & Sound | Top Ten Poll 2002 - How the directors and critics voted
- ^ http://www.theyshootpictures.com/website_Top1000_CriticsChoices_Dec07.pdf
- ^ "Beautiful Losers (2008) - Movie Connections". The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2008-05-09.