Ray Pride

"Mistake-ism" is a word Harmony Korine coined for himself--try every damned thing as if you'll never have a chance to again. Yet "Gummo" tumbles along to its own blissed-out rhythm, never pretending to the alleged ethnographic veracity of the Korine-penned "Kids." Korine, mistaken for a skateboarding New York clubber, in fact spent his formative years near Nashville, where "Gummo" was shot. "Gummo" is a Southern piece through and through, particular in its embrace of a dark and freakish mood. "Oh, it's completely Southern, it's totally, one-hundred-percent Southern," Korine agreed the first time I met him. "I'm a Southern boy so how would it not be?" "Gummo" takes the form of peculiar vignettes, a form Korine admires in American joke-telling as well. His eclectic teenage white-trash fantasia, which is composed mostly of vaudeville-like routines, vignettes that incorporate an albino woman who adores Patrick Swayze and mentally challenged performers, and unlikely actors such as a grown-up, tap-dancing Linda Manz, from "Days of Heaven," as a silly-if-loving mom. His teenagers, like Malick's, are innocents who make it up as they go along. And "Gummo" boasts as many bare boy-chests as a season's worth of Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts fashion layouts. As photographed by the great Jean-Yves Escoffier, "Gummo" alternates gorgeous, sometimes dreamlike imagery, with poker-faced scenes that can be intensely distasteful. There's glue sniffing, cat-torture and the murder of an invalid grandmother. Yet Korine's use of music and sound is rich and inventive, and his sometimes startling use of mixed media, including Super 8, video and Polaroids, marks his debut feature as bold work. At its brightest most luminous moments, "Gummo" suggests the go-for-broke immediacy of nineties Asian filmmaking.

"Gummo" plays Friday and Saturday at midnight at the Music Box.

(2003-02-19)

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