The motives behind certain movies--especially the experimental, impressionistic, or disturbing ones--can be as inscrutable as those of your big brother. And like when your brother decides to punch you, the experience will be painful, no matter how much he thinks you need it.
I like the idea of filmmakers trying new things. If not for innovators we'd all be watching one-second clips of our favorite meat animals. But there's a reason traditional storytelling devices have become traditional. If you throw them away, you risk a mess like 1997's Gummo, a marathon of tedium where the finished product is as adrift as its characters.
In Xenia, Ohio, the youth get by in various ways. Some kill cats and sell the meat. Some wear big pink bunny hoods everywhere they go; others drink beer and huff glue. There's one thing they've all got in common: they nearly all go shirtless.
You know how some movies have characters doing things that make sense and eventually their experiences tell a meaningful story? Well, Gummo doesn't. Depending on your reaction to that, you could call it either "a series of loose vignettes" or "less compelling than watching your DVD timer tick through 85 minutes instead."
Things happen--the bunny boy gets kicked around, a drunk guy fights a chair, three girls (including Chloe Sevigny) run away from an incompetent pervert--it just doesn't add up to anything. Most characters are seen once and never again. Maybe t his is writer/director Harmony Korine's search for a character who's actually worth watching, but I have my doubts.
Because first and foremost, Gummo is tying to weird you out. To stress you. I don't mind being distressed, as a glance at the societies taking root on my stovetop will prove. I do mind being manipulated without purpose.
I don't like to act like I know a director's motives, but c'mon. Scene after scene of dead cats. A kid eating dinner out of his filthy bathtub. And the ultimate sign Korine's pushing buttons with as much subtlety as a drunken texter: the movie's got a black midget and an albino.
No doubt this makes for some memorable imagery, and if you squint really hard, you can pretend Gummo's saying something about how people deal with poverty and boredom. But this is the kind of thing that gives indie movies a bad name. It could have given us all the drowned kitties and small-town angst it wanted to and still told a damn story. It's hard to care about reprehensible characters when they can't even find ways to have fun being bad.
