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Rating: "Oh, I just watched Gummo, it's a fantastic movie... watch it!" - "I’ll check it on Wiki... Oh there's Burzum in the soundtrack, that's cool!! but what’s it about?"
That's the question that made me want to write a review on "Gummo"; I don’t think there can be answers to the question "What is Gummo" because this film is about everything and nothing, it speaks of many stories (or perhaps it's better to call them "scenes") intertwined most of the time without a logical connection except for "the story" of Tummler and Solomon, two boys who live by killing cats and then selling them for money (-> drugs), everything seems to go "smoothly" until the appearance of a rival and they begin to follow his lead; but the fact is that this plot will never have a "solution" because everything will end without explanations, without solutions, like all other episodes of the film (intertwined, which proceed parallel to the "main" story), an absolutely nihilistic film, raw, hyper-realistic that speaks of lives on the edge of civilization in this remote American town where emotions, values, and feelings no longer have significance, where everything is reduced to mere "living" amid the primitive needs of man, an apathetic, iconic, and (in some cases) realistic portrait of people and realities on the brink.
The scenes I could mention are many, the famous final scene for example, or the beautiful scene in the house of the "business rival" or the disconnected scenes featuring the "rabbit ears" boy, poetic, raw, often senseless but very expressive at the same time, or the "among friends" scene of destroying a chair out of frustration or when the two protagonists go to a disabled girl for a sexual relationship or yet the quick story of the girl abused by her father and many, many other fragments of "everyday" life in the universe Xenia (the town in the film).
How can one judge a film like "Gummo" if not with purely subjective values? For its search for "truth", for its raw spontaneity, for its complex nature (because it is the individual episodes that build the film, even if not connected, they shape it, building the world of this city), for its entirety, for its being a bit unripe but at the same time realistic and for its twisted poetry; in my opinion a masterpiece. If you are not easily impressionable, watch it, an experience that will certainly mark you.
Wonderful.
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Other reviews
By C.H.A.R.L.I.E Nokia
Gummo is the director’s disease which is the disease of the whole world.
This is poetry, not the Hollywood-scented crap.
By Apple_of_sodomY
Gummo represents a huge bloody gash in the world of wealth and the filth we create day after day.
Harmony Korine with those scenes hits us like a punch in the stomach that really hurts.
