Review of Gummo (1997) by Stokes — 22 Dec 2013

FRIENDS, don't let anyone else's opinion of this film influence whether or not you see it. This is a cinematic experience that's considered invaluable by most contemporary filmmakers you MIGHT like (Gus Van Sant Director of Good Will Hunting, Werner Herzog director of, most notably perhaps in America, Rescue Dawn), and regardless, this is a fantastic, bizarre, emotional roller-coaster of an independent that you owe it to yourself to see.

Think of nothing in this movie as literal, and all of it as metaphorical, and you see a brazen, honest look at the way we value beauty, love, femininity at its core in a world curiously devoid of the love of a mother. Think about the scene where Korine himself, a fantastically drunk gay young man, is attempting to elicit sex, or at the least understanding, from a gay, black, encephalic dwarf, because he has 'no one to love him, no one to listen to him.' Or think about this film entirely as literal, and you still see an oblique and unblinking look at the cesspool-ier elements of America.

This is a movie for those people. There is pain, suffering, sheer weirdness and killing cats all throughout this 'plot', but at its core this is a beautiful and honest meditation on the lives of people who don't create culture, but are forced to deal with the culture that we churn out for the 'beautiful people.'

My heart was broken during the scene where the character Solomon, instead of having sex with a woman with Downs that her brother is pimping out, simply asks her if she finds him attractive. And I hope yours is too.