Ashley Benson, James Franco, and Vanessa Hudgens (A24)Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers does a lot of things that I hate. Its characters are vapid, mindless hard bodies driven by sex and drugs. In movies from Piranha 3D to 21 and Over, I have wanted characters like this to die a painful onscreen death (and when in the former they actually did die, I hated it more). For much of its running time, Spring Breakers uses the kind of handheld camerawork—some of it from crummy commercial-grade VHS footage—that drives me insane. But for reasons that have little to do with the content, the movie kept my interest for most of its first hour. It’s kind of beautiful in its sordid, horrible way, its beauty not one that’s easy on the eye but it is certainly easy on the ear.
The music sets the tone. Cliff Martinez, who wrote terrific retro-synth music for Drive, lays down a somber foundation with the help of Skrillex, who scores the film’s first slo-mo scenes of beer and misogyny. His “Scary monsters and nice sprites” is mournful dubstep that intermittently morphs into an aural horror show: somebody cries out “asshole,” the beats stop and turn on themselves, and the slo-motion visual distortion finds a matching audio distortion for a neon picture of the end of civilization, as we know it.
This Floridian overture—with its promise of debauchery—gives way to the pedestrian. Boring establishing shots set up the unnamed campus where Selena Gomez and her friends sit in church groups or classrooms. A couple of interchangeable blondes (High School Musical brat Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson) sit in a lecture on the Civil War and civil rights, but lessons about a nation torn apart are the last thing they want to learn on the cusp of spring break. As an image of Emmet Till, the 14-year-old African-American savagely beaten to death for whistling at a white woman in 1955, is projected on a classroom screen, all the girls can think about is dick.
The simple plot goes back at least to 1960’s Where the Boys Are, which like Spring Breakers revolves around four girls headed south to party. Hollywood revisits this pattern on a regular basis, from Where the Boys Are ‘84 to the MTV coverage that also inspired Korine, and in their own fashion, each paints a candy-colored picture of the changing mores of a generation. Korine has written about bad teens since his first movie credit, the script for Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids. Korine’s work as an indie director can be provocative and precious, though you have to give him props for casting Werner Herzog not once but twice. Korine adds a new concern that is as good a sign of the times as any: guns.
Into this neon morass comes Alien, née Al, a rapper played with undisguised glee by James Franco. When the girls are arrested at a party, Alien bails them out of jail and introduces them to his world of guns and blue kool-aid. In a just society, his prosthetic grillz (a nod to Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy) should run away with next year’s best supporting Oscar. Franco steals the movie, but the movie falters when he does. A rivalry with his former best friend Archie (Gucci Mane) turns the movie into something more ordinary, and then a little precious.
(A24)Did I mention I’d hate these characters in any other movie? Why does this one get a pass? There’s something in the tone that the music and visuals set, the explicit loss of innocence, not just in God-fearing Gomez but in the sense of natural beauty and Gulf Coast paradise into which these hard bodies descend and get blotto. “I want to nullify my life,” the soundtrack could have said, but Martinez’ score is not so obvious. The electronic monotony recalls Tangerine Dream’s score to another generation’s coming-of-age movie, Risky Business. There is no celebratory underwear dance here, but music that suits a sinister day-glo vision of a world gone to the beach.
The camerawork, sloppy and throwaway suits the atmosphere as well. Even the crappy VHS footage is part of the distortion of unreality in this young bacchanalia, a filter through which these kids with the perfect eyesight of the young and the bodies of gods and goddesses obliterate their faculties, unable to see but the foggiest coke-induced and beer goggled vision of their environment.
It’s a kind of horrible poetry, a misogynistic pentameter measured out in iambic bikinis. Korine films the besotted proceedings with contempt for the parade of douchery, a particular American douchery in which he does not shy away from tits and ass and exploitation (his wife Rachel Korine gets the worst of the latter). Harmony Korine quickly announces this as a nation of cheap thrills, as two blondes suck at red white and blue bomb pops.
This is what our forefathers fought for.
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Written and directed by Harmony Korine
With Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, James Franco
Rated R for strong sexual content, language, nudity, drug use and violence throughout
Running time 94 minutes
