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I seriously doubt Harmony Korine, the 23 - year old writer - director of GUMMO, will ever give an interview that includes the phrase, "What I'd really like to do is get my foot in the door in Hollywood." Which is not to say there's anything inherently wrong with the Hollywood system. It produces, in order of frequency, crap, entertainment and art and probably always will; the ratio varies from year to year, but not by much, and anyone who longs for a vanished golden age of quality is living in a world of deluded wishful thinking. But there's no denying the major studios [and the minors, like Miramax and Fine Line] demand a certain fidelity to formula, just like the automakers of Detroit or the magazine mills of New York. If you want to work on the big boys' terms, you have to follow their rules.

And that's OK. Ideally, the rules of commercial filmmaking exist for the same reason that the rules of representational painting and Western harmonic composition exist: To help artists who aren't bold or brilliant produce something watchable. When young filmmakers claim they despise genres, formulas and the three - act screenwriting structure [or for that matter, Aristotle's basic tenets of drama] they're either being naive or lying through their teeth. On some level, they know improvisation without discipline can bore the audience to tears, and that simply telling a story with a beginning, middle and end is challenge enough. It takes a special kind of vision to even attempt a rule - breaking movie, let alone create a good one. So few filmmakers are up to the task that it's probably better if they don't even try.

Korine -- who wrote his first screenplay, for Larry Clark's controversial KIDS, at 19 -- has that vision. I make this pronouncement with great trepidation, because I know some readers may interpret it as an unequivocal endorsement of GUMMO. Believe me, it isn't. I attended a screening with perhaps other 20 viewers and counted at least four exasperated walkouts; bear in mind I'm talking about critics, filmmakers and other people who watch movies for a living. So I am not -- repeat, not -- telling you that you'll like GUMMO. I am telling you it's unlike anything you've seen in a while -- maybe ever -- and that if you're the kind of person who claims to be frustrated by the predictability of commercial filmmaking, this is a rare opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.

Released by Fine Line, a mini - major not known for its love of avant - garde narrative, the film follows the banal daily lives of a group of adolescents in Xenia, Ohio. The film has no plot, just a series of situations. There are no stars, just a couple of experienced character actors and a small army of untutored amateurs; they play characters, but the characters don't have "arcs" or "back stories" or "objectives." They simply exist, moving and talking and interacting with each other while we watch. They don't change or grow. They just are. And the filmmaker could not care less whether you like them.

GUMMO begins with a sequence that will probably tip some viewers' pretension detectors into the red zone: a grainy video montage explaining that years ago, Xenia was devastated by a tornado, followed by a wordless sequence in which a shirtless 12 - year old [Jacob Sewell] wearing a pink hood with bunny ears wanders around the town like some mysterious wood sprite. In time, we are introduced to Korine's cast of characters -- lower - class white children of the type we rarely see outside the realm of trashy daytime talk shows or old Andy Warhol movies. The narrator is 15 - year old Solomon [Jacob Reynolds], a lanky, sweet - faced sociopath who tools through Xenia on a dirt bike with his barely - adolescent best buddy, Tummler [Nick Sutton], sniffing glue, scamming on chicks and looking for stray cats to kill and sell to a local restaraunt supplier. [Relax, animal rights activists; the feline corpses aren't real.] Solomon's mother [Linda Manz, the child narrator of DAYS OF HEAVEN making her first screen appearance in two decades] is an earthy widow who's still haunted by the death of her tap - dancer husband. The local pimp is a puffy - eyed cokehead named Cole [Max Perlich] who sells mattress time with his only prostitute, an affection - starved retarded woman. The local teen sirens are a couple of white - haired siblings named Dot [KIDS co - star Chloe Sevigny, who also designed the film's costumes] and Helen [Carisa]; they live in a small house with their parents, their adoring kid sister [Darby Dougherty] and a cat named Foot - Foot. Assorted minor characters orbit around them like particles of detritus caught up in a funnel cloud.

What do these kids want?? Mostly, they just want their days to be interesting. But because they lack moral compasses [the direct result of their poverty and a lack of parental supervision,] their definition of "interesting" is often lurid and sad and self - defeating. Korine and his brilliant cinematographer, Jean Yves - Escoffier, use the camera as, alternately, a simple recording device and a method of expressing abstract, apropos - of - nothing poetic sensations. There are long, nuanced sequences of observed behaviour, packed with journalistic details; gritty bike - riding montages set to death metal music; idiotic and shockingly brutal incidents of teenaged criminality, and voice - over musings that seem purposefully unconnected to the images they accompany. From time to time, Korine cuts to video footage of a tornado that tore through Xenia, or "home movies" in which characters yammer into the camera or perform a lame comedy routine or song - and - dance number. Pumped - up teenaged skinheads beat each other senseless in a kitchen. Dot and Helen put tape on their breasts and tear it off to enlarge their nipples. There are retarded people whose difference is lingered on at great length -- not exploitively, but not sentimentally, either.

Midway through the film, Korine himself appears in a cameo as a blitheringly drunk gay teenager trying to seduce an encephalitic black dwarf. What, exactly, is the point of this whirlwind of strangeness?? Good question.

I'm not convinced there is one, or that the film needs to have one. GUMMO exists for its own sake. It's like an evocative but jumbled collage that mixes found material with created images, or one of those fat, ambitious double albums that offer a smorgasbord of songs in different modes. I've seen it described in print as a "quasi - documentary" and an "experimental feature," but while both phrases fit, they don't tell the whole story. In the press notes, director Gus van Sant [an admirer and patron of Korine's] admiringly invokes the names of Werner Herzog, John Cassavetes, Federico Fellini, Derek Jarman, documentarians Albert and David Maysles and hipster - grotesque photographer Diane Arbus. That's quite a laundry list of influences, and it's more or less accurate, but it doesn't tell the whole story, either.

My own sense is that GUMMO is part impressionist sociological collage, part American neorealist movie -- a ragged - edged, dreamy art object that is intended not to be analyzed and defined, but reacted to. You're supposed to give into it and feel it -- to let it seep into your subconscious. Though the film appears formless and directionless, it is clearly the product of phenomenal discipline. What happens onscreen is dumb, immature, shortsighted, crude, aimless, nonsensical; I don't blame people a bit for walking out in annoyance or disgust. Yet even if you hate Korine's vision, it's hard not to admit that it is, in fact, a vision. The individual components are hit - or - miss, and some parts are inscrutable, shallowly precocious or both, but there isn't a familiar or unoriginal moment. GUMMO is alive in a way that few films are.

The aliveness comes from Korine's ability to grant physical form to childish ideas and emotions while simultaneously providing ironic distance. Watching it is like being inside the mind of a child without losing access to your own adult perceptions. [Maybe I'm just coming down from a Terrence Malick high, but it seems to me the film owes a debt to BADLANDS and DAYS OF HEAVEN. From the teen hero's bone - dry voice over narration to the enchanted landscapes to the luminous closeups of unglamorous faces, GUMMO has a decidedly Malick - esque vibe; the presence of Linda Manz merely makes the connection explicit.] Korine's controlled, empathetic tone puts us inside each moment. We sense the filmmaker truly understands these kids and their world and has reimagined both without condescension.

This is a marked departure from Larry Clark's direction of KIDS, which was cold and morbid and made all Korine's characters seem either hapless or worthless. In GUMMO, we look at the nonactors onscreen -- especially the retarded children, the dwarf, a deaf couple arguing in sign language in a bowling alley and other physically afflicted individuals -- and wonder, "Do these people understand what it means to be in a movie, or is their presence amount to a callous stunt??" I think they do understand what they're doing. A clever director might be able to trick one or two people into exploiting themselves on camera, but doing the same with a large ensemble cast is impossible. In any case, Korine genuinely likes and appreciates them.

His affection shows in the way they're photographed: radiantly. The rhetorical question a lesser filmmaker would have posed would read, "Aren't these folks odd??" Instead, the movie asks, "What's so odd about these folks??"

Or, as one character puts it, "Life is beautiful ... Really it is."

--Matt Seitz

New York Press