Gummo is quite the film. It’s an examination of a town after devastation. A film that showcases how people move on from a disaster or in this film’s case how people don’t really move on. Personally, none of these characters really move on from the devastation, but they adapt to the ruin. Many of the characters have kicked into their survival mode, and that has led them to do some pretty unspeakable things.
While Kids showcased the harsh reality of teens growing up in the big city, Gummo tells the opposite story. Gummo follows the lives of multiple members of a small midwestern town after a tornado came through, causing mass destruction and killing many. The trauma of the incident has caused this many of the townspeople, especially the kids as showcased in the film, into shells of themselves that just exist without any aspirations for the future. Many of the patrons, specifically the young, has thrown caution to the wind and just live their lives as the trauma from the event was too strong. Every other issue in the world is nothing compared to the chaos that the tornado caused.
Many see this film as meaningless. The film doesn’t really have a story and it just purely based on vibes. The fact that this film is about nothing is quite smart, since that’s how the patrons live their lives, with no goals or a future plan. The devastation took everything that the townspeople were working toward away, so everyone got comfortable doing absolutely nothing.
Others see this film as disturbing. People see movies to escape reality, but some filmmakers decide to go into the world of hyper realistic cinema. Harmony Korine has a track record with that along with some other controversially received directors like Lars Von Trier and Sean Baker. The very reason these directors and their films are seen as disturbing and controversial are because they touch a nerve that’s a bit too realistic. With films like Gummo or Kids or Red Rocket or even The House That Jack Built, the audience has a harder time differentiating fact from fiction leading to viewers finding them uncomfortable or disturbing. Art is meant to make the audience feel something. The best films showcase a world or idea that the audience hasn’t really delved into before or show the viewers a different perspective on an idea or an argument. Solomon and his mom (played by the fantastic yet under-appreciated Linda Manz) live in filth because that’s the hand that they were given. The basement of their house would give people flashbacks to reruns of Hoarders. The whole town has become very dog eat dog in its mentality and that has lead many citizens in the town to live this lifestyle. Those elements leave the audience uncomfortable because it’s a part of our society and this world that they don’t want to acknowledge. People don’t wanna go the theatre to be reminded of the world around them and that’s why this film along with every other hyper realistic film in the sub genre has garnered distain from audiences. The viewers don’t wanna be reminded of a certain part of our society that they decide not to acknowledge and sometimes even avoid.
The film is able to achieve the realism in many ways. One of most effective being the camera work and cinematography. Korine uses a handheld approach to the film giving it a feeling of actually living the same events in the film. It’s almost as if you have a window into a world that you were not aware of before and one that you might not actually want to be aware of. The choice of camera angles to the way that the set design feels a bit off to the costume design curated and created entirely by the amazing Chloë Sevigny, Every element of how this film looks too real to be fiction and that helps the illusion the film is presenting.
The writing works with it well also as the lines in this film feel completely natural. With his films, Korine spends time living in the worlds of his scripts to get a full sense of how people act and communicate. This attention to detail leads to his scripts to develop a level of realism that many hollywood films can’t achieve. One of the elements of his scripts that make them unique are the topics that he decides to delve into. His films cover topics that many filmmakers don’t wanna touch with a ten foot pole. His films along with other controversial filmmakers in this style, have an urge to examine the world with the most realistic lens possible. This choice leads to many subjects cropping up in the scripts that many filmmakers see as no-go concepts. It takes a fantastic screenwriter to delve into these topics and do it in a way that doesn’t ever feel fake or even in some cases exploitative. Korine wants to take the audience into a world that isn’t too far away from ours in his films, and I applaud that.
The last element that helps bring the realism is the fantastic acting. From the always phenomenal acting from Chloë Sevigny to the realistic acting from Linda Manz all the way to the surprisingly good pseudo lead performance from Jacob Reynolds. Every performance in this film is done with so much consideration to never break the illusion that all of what your seeing is real. Much of that brilliance comes from the fact that the characters they are portraying are based on real communities in the United States at that time and cultures that still exist in America to this day. It was probably a mix of ease and challenge for these actors as they don’t have to make up a whole type of character, but they have to play it with such talent that people believe it as complete reality. The talent of the actors is present as every single one of them is able to do that.
I appreciate Gummo and the other films in the hyper realism sub-genre because they take on subjects and cultures that people actively avoid because it leads many to feel uncomfortable. In art, we need pieces of cinema that balance out the scale. We get so many films that take as to worlds that we can’t even fully comprehend year after year. It’s nice that filmmakers like Korine want to tell stories that exist completely in the world that we exist to in this moment without as little fiction as possible.
THE RATING:
