When I hear the term ‘art flick’, I think beautiful camera work, intriguing exaggerated characters and little or no plot. Personally, I really have to be in the right mood to enjoy an ‘art flick’. I wish someone would have told me this was an ‘art flick’.
There is no defensible plot to this movie. It is a series of vignettes that take place in Xenia, Ohio. These come together to form a stark, bleak, often offensive portrait of a rural, “white trash” town torn in the wake of a tornado attack. “I saw a girl fly through the sky and I looked up her skirt.” Fortunately, for the intrepid, bold, patient viewer, many, maybe most, of these scenes follow a pair of characters, Solomon and Tummler. Solomon’s could range anywhere from 8 to 15. Tummler looks a bit older. Both are dirty, ignorant except in voiceovers, and fairly ugly: the perfect portal into Xenia, a town rife with filth, and a surface ugliness that on further examination shows some insight and beauty.
‘Gummo’ contains a healthy dose of cat symbolism. Solomon and Tummler kill stray cats and sell them for spending money. (Money that apparently gets spent on retarded whores, glue to sniff, and whipcream, for the nitrous oxide, natch.) Dot (Chloë Sevigny) and her sisters own a cat that may or may not be pregnant and is later lost. The cat, Foot Foot, is presumably killed by Solomon and Tummler, but nothing can be explicit in an art flick. This narrative about cats can be at best described as a subplot, a subplot to no main plot. My initial reaction to the cats is that they are a parallel to the citizens of Xenia. They amble aimlessly, just getting by, until one day their number is up, and the tornado comes to town.
eh, who knows. it’s art, make up your own mind.
All in all, my best advice concerning this movie, sorry, film is caveat
emptor. It is brilliant and beautiful, but you have to be ready to work
for it. Where ‘Kids’ held your hand through the tumults of The
City, all you get from ‘Gummo’ is some skinny, shirtless kid
wearing bunny ears riding a skateboard.