We may be watching the same process in the career of director Harmony Korine, whose new work, julien donkey-boy , is an improvement over his foolish last film, Gummo . But a new compassion seems to be growing in Korine, no matter how he stamps it out. The screenwriter of Kids is not yet 25, and he still has his teenage sensibility intact. Adults are either childlike or monotonous bastards.
Women are almost an afterthought compared to the loneliness and purity of the adolescent male.
In the film's best scene, Sevigny is haloed in solarized light as she walks past glowing white weeds, singing a hymn about the Lamb of God. It's a vision out of Blake. Father is trying to make a champion Olympic wrestler out of the boy by hosing him down on freezing days, forcing him to jump on plastic trash cans and making him practice a routine in which he climbs up a carpeted staircase using only his hands. Perhaps she has Virgin Mary fantasies. The real voice of the film belongs to Father, since Herzog delivers some ranting, improvised dinner-table monologues.