FILM REVIEW - Gummo...

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Gummo is like a really gorgeous girl in a bikini who's been dragged along a gritty concrete path littered with glass at 60 miles per hour. It's like a tornado blew a pile of home-videos to pieces and scattered the pieces for miles, then some bored, lonely, outcast teenager discovered them and decided to piece them together, adding his own little videos to it. In short, Gummo is both beautiful and moving, and horrible and depraved. It all depends on the viewer, and how he/she looks at it. It's a grotesque collage, a nihilistic chaos caused by some natural disaster...

Harmony Korine's Gummo begins with images of life in a small American town; Xenia, Ohio. It shows life before and during a tornado that hits and devastates the town, as Solomon, one of the anti-heroes of the film, provides a haunting and sad voice-over. The images in this scene are like little snippets of memory; of nightmares, newscasts; dreams, paradise. One second we see a small girl smiling at us, the next minute we see things flying through the air as Solomon tells us he looked up the skirt of a girl he saw fly through the air. As shocking as some of this is, it's never graphic, indeed it's totally suggestive, coming only from blurred and grainy bits of image and Solomon's description of the event. This opening sequence, both vague and vivid, sets the mood and tone for the entire movie. Then we are introduced to Bunny Boy, a mysterious skate-boarding kid who wears rabbit ears and never talks. He is caged in a filthy bridge above a freeway; urinating and spitting on the traffic below, smoking and kicking at the fencing that separates him from the outside world. Far from being random and pointless, this scene symbolizes his loneliness and alienation from the rest of the world. The rest of the world speeds away while he is trapped in the boring, timeless Xenia. Indeed he is lonely throughout the film, wandering the streets and skate-boarding. He is rejected and "shot" by two foul-mouthed youngsters in cowboy costumes in a junkyard; only really finding love in the form of the two blonde sisters after he kills their beloved cat without them knowing and falls into their arms in a swimming pool in the pouring rain in the haunting final sequence. The sisters wander around the town talking about random things, like attracting boys, and the cat. One of them is played by Korine regular Chloe Sevigny, who demonstrates to her sister a method of making your nipples look bigger; putting duct tape over them. They have a little sister who tags along with them. In one scene she puts a large image of Burt Reynolds over her face and proclaims -

"I wanna moustache dammit! I wanna look like Burt Reynolds!"

She's not the only character to mention a famous celebrity. In one sequence an albino woman talks to the camera about her attraction to Patrick Swayze. There are several such odd tangents in this film. And last but definitely not least there are the two main characters, those who we follow through most of the film; Solomon and Tummler. Solomon is a young boy who lives with his mother. His father died in the tornado. Tummler is much older. He lives with his father. Tummler and Solomon travel around town on dirt-bikes and kill stray cats by drowning them or shooting them with BB guns, selling them to a man who in turn sells them to restaraunts. They also enjoy talking, having sex, sniffing glue and drinking milkshakes. The people in this film also seem to live in abnormally cluttered houses, piled high with junk. From this brief description they may seem depraved and sick, but in the film they are portrayed as free spirits doing the best they can to make a living under the circumstances, and the activities are never graphic, in fact they are never seen save for the drowning of a cat near the beginning. There are some tender moments between the pair, as when high on glue Tummler talks to Solomon about his homosexual brother, who apparently moved away. Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton give fantastic performances as the shameless yet charming pair.

It's a very complex and often incoherent film, with too many ideas to digest in one viewing. Yet while at first it seems random, and it certainly is in parts (like a Tornado-stricken wasteland), Gummo does in fact have a deliberate if very loose narrative structure. The lives of certain characters sometimes impact off one another, and this is not made apparent at first, but unfolds before the viewer's eyes, as after Bunny Boy is embraced by the sisters, we see that it is he who killed the cat they spent so long looking for. So they adopt a new pet, a bunny instead of a cat. This is both funny and absurd. Near the start of the film, Tummler is about to shoot the cat belonging to the sisters, only to be stopped by Solomon, because it's a house-cat (apparently they only kill stray cats). If Tummler had killed the cat, things might have gone differently in the film. So what at first seems random and pointless is in fact important and consequential.
So what meaning can I uncover from three viewings of the film. Well I think it's ultimately a film about nature, and the sometimes incomprehensible, unneccessary and pointless destruction it can cause, from the tornado to the whipping of a cat hanging from a tree by Solomon and Tummler. The film asks what the point of morality and order is when it can be completely blown away in a second by something humans can't control or stop; mother nature, or God. It's also about alienation, boredom, isolation and death. In one particularly difficult scene Tummler disconnects the life-support machine of the grandmother of a rival cat-killer, claiming she's "been dead for ages." Perhaps she has. It's as if from the moment the film starts we've been swept up in a whirlwind and taken to Oz, only it's not full of lions and tin-men, it's a harsh yet beautiful place full of death and decay. As we follow the stray cats who kill the stray cats there is revealed a face, the distorted face of a sad, decaying society that molests and casts out it's children. This is a film about people desperate to find a point to their lives, to find a jewel among the rubble. It's disgusting, painful, nihilistic, beautiful, funny, fascinating, meaningful, pointless, random, and it's also a masterpiece. Bernardo Bertolluci called it "the one revolutionary film on the nineties." A film critic famously called it "the worst film ever made." It could be both, it all depends on how you look at it...

Cast and crew neglected by film buffs and sometimes directors?

More often than not, film buffs and critics and the like talk mostly about the director or "auteur" of a film rather than the cast and crew; to which cursory attention is paid. Directors themselves often seem to place themselves above others who work in film, even great ones like Roman Polanski, who said -

"The best films are because of nobody but the director."

This may just be coming from his ego, as from his films one can gather that Polanski understood the collaborative process of film very well. But while the director, or sometimes "auteur" may be the creative force behind the film, I submit that the best films are because of nobody but the director, cinematographer, actor, actress, tea-boy, caterer, cameraman, lighting man, makeup lady (sorry if I'm stereotyping), composer, producer, music superviser, editor, casting director, production designer, art director, set decorator, costume designer, assistant director, sound-man, special-effects man, stuntman, electrical supervisor, title designer, and last but definitely not least; the writer, often a huge creative force behind a film. For who can watch Citizen Kane and not see that it couldn't have worked not only without Orson Welles as director, with his distinctive and powerful visual style, but without the cast, cinematographer (who could fail to notice), and of course Orson Welles the actor. For no-one else could have possibly played Charles Foster Kane, at least not the Charles Foster Kane I know, although I don't know him fully (I don't think anyone does). And no-one else but Agnes Moorehead could have played his cold mother; no-one else but Joseph Cotton could have played Jed Leland. So film is without a shadow of a doubt a collaborative process, despite the elitist attitude of some critics and auteurs, like Hitchcock and his "cattle" theory. Often great directors have mistreated their collaborators, most famously Fritz Lang; who threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs on the set of "M," Billy Wilder who bullied his assistants, and Hitchcock who sexually harrassed women and played cruel practical jokes on people. This inherent lack of humility in some famous directors I maintain is the product of ego, for they still knew how to collaborate, and knew that without those around them they wouldn't be much. Robert Bresson's disliked actors, and opted to use non-professionals or "models" in his films. As great a director as he was, he was very much against acting as a profession, or anything as a profession perhaps.

And I myself am guilty of being painfully ignorant of so many involved in the making of a film. So now I've decided upon watching film credits the whole way through, and reading every name that comes up. And the director is definitely not the only one with a whole creative vision, for would Chinatown have worked without Robert Towne and his knowledge and experience of California, and what would Tarantino the director be without Tarantino the writer? Direction is simply and obviously the combination of every element...as important as the director is, he/she simply points...

Why TV adaptations never usually work...

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I generally don't like TV. British TV is more dour than a wet seal in a tar pit, and is usually just crap anyway. The only things I watch on TV are Desperate Housewives and The Simpsons, and of course the occasional film, even though they always show the good ones at the most awkward times. For example, Robert Altman's Nashville was on at the ridiculous time of 1:40 AM not long ago. Of course that's not always the case, but I'm detracting from the point. Films based on TV shows are almost always ways for people to shamelessly cash in on a successful TV show. They're usually tarted up to be "cinematic," even though many episodes of The Simpsons were far more cinematic than that awful cash-cow from a couple of years ago. What was Matt Groening thinking!?! Did he actually have much to do with the movie, or was it written by a bunch of movie-execs and the writers of shit like Family Guy? Because unless Groening has lost a huge amount of imagination and creativity in the space of a few years, he is a genuinly great comedy writer. Just look at the ill-fated cartoon gem Futurama. And it's not only The Simpsons, but other great shows like The X-Files. That movie was dire. As with The Simpsons they took a great TV show, stripped it of imagination and creativity and loaded it with a huge budget and tons of effects to make it more "cinematic." The X-Files was almost Lynchian in parts; it was wonderful on TV. But the movie is a cliched piece of crap about huge government conspiracies and flying hubcaps. The final scene, in which a giant UFO flies over Mulder and Scully is laughable. I mean, just a plain UFO, nothing more or less? How imaginitive of them...