 |
| DIRECTED BY |
| Harmony Korine
|
| STARRING |
| Jacob Sewell |
| Lara Tosh |
| Jacob Reynolds |
| Darby Dougherty |
| Chlo� Sevigny |
 |
Visually sordid and relentlessly depressing, director Harmony Korine creates a disturbing amalgamation of fact and fiction (although he�d probably like us to believe it all to be factual) with �Gummo.� But how difficult is it, really, to create a disturbing effect on an audience by bombarding them with visuals of dead, maggot-infested felines and teenaged transsexuals? It can�t be much more difficult than it sounds and after the shock value of the film wears off, the question of whatever grand societal statement Korine is trying to make with this cluster of amateurishly shot footage only grows larger.
The defenders of �Gummo� seem to think of it as an unflinching portrait of the indifference of modern-day society and a depiction of the grotesqueries that all of us �normal folk� seem to be ignoring; there certainly isn�t any other justification for making this film. And I can�t even buy that explanation because of the fact that Korine appears to be trying to sell �Gummo� as a documentary when most of it is clearly fictional, and why someone would want to even visualize some of the schlock that�s present in this film is far beyond my comprehension.
The stark atmosphere of the film is its only affective component; Korine even approaches the point of saying something convincing but never actually develops it enough to get there. The story of a female albino and her affections for Patrick Swayze is particularly memorable, even though it doesn�t really amount to anything other than a feeling of pity. And then there is a sequence showing us two brothers casually fist fighting with themselves, followed later on by a gathering of friends who enjoy passing their time by demolishing table chairs. We�ve all known people who are this stupid in our lives; do we really need to watch a film about them?
�Gummo� could be considered a daring docudrama, but it wanders off course far too many times for much of it to seem relevant at all by the end. Some will just laugh at its audacity, but it�s more sad than anything else. It really is a shame that Korine couldn�t find a narrative track to stay on, because by the end the film gets just about as messy as the environment that we�re watching these characters inhabit. Oh, but even though she plays a half-baked hick in this film � Chloe Sevigny still manages to be nice to look at.
