Spring Break. Nothing more need be said before a rush of images comes to mind. Beach parties, bikini-clad women, tanned men, beer bongs, body shots, and a whole lot of "whoooooooooooooo!" Hollywood glorifies such behavior. You know it and I know it, but we always go along for the ride. Getting wasted makes for memorable stories, right? After all, you only live once. Your "real" life is necessary but boring and monotonous, so you HAVE to get away by going somewhere new and throwing out all troubles and inhibitions. Countless sex comedies, while entertaining, ultimately have this underlying message. Leave it to an independent filmmaker like Harmony Korine to take Hollywood's dominant ideology and drop it on its head.
Spring Breakers is a relentlessly dark and disturbing take on the "Spring Break" phenomenon, but it starts out deceptively lighthearted. The opening, color-saturated images of a beach party gone wild, set to the pulsating score of Skillrex. When we meet the four main characters: college students Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine, the director's wife), they're lamenting how boring everyday life is and how they can come up with the extra cash to hit Florida for a few days of partying. But it isn't long before events take a turn for the unsavory. Candy, Brit, and Cotty rob a diner to come up with the necessary cash, and later on during Spring Break, they're arrested for drug possession at a party. Low-level rapper Alien (James Franco) is smitten by the bikini-clad gang and bails them out of jail. But while Faith is understandably disturbed by their new "friend"'s lifestyle, the other three are seduced into activities far more unsavory than drinking and partying.
Korine delights in pushing viewers buttons and toying with his/her expectations. When we first meet Faith, she's at a Christian group meeting, and if your reaction is to laugh and say, "What a bunch of lame Jesus freaks," that's probably the director's intent. The robbery of the diner is presented from a detached perspective (Cotty slowly driving by as we observe Brit and Candy's actions through a window) and seems almost tame before later being revisited in its full ugliness. The first 30 of the film sets up a viewer's expectations regarding a fun Spring Break excursion that Korine meticulously deconstructs over the next hour.
The movie's cautionary message is that while partying and drinking aren't inherently bad every now and then, a lifestyle that revolves around these activities ultimately hides something much more sinister underneath. Faith is an easy character to identify with. She's a good girl who just wants to experiment and step outside her boxed-in life, but the other three are disturbed individuals. Faith leaves to go home not long after Alien arrives on the scene, but the fact that the man is a drug dealer who has all the money and luxurious possessions one could want but is ultimately a thug doesn't bother Brit, Candy, or Cotty. It's something new and exciting. Only at the very end of the movie do they finally show some faint signs of understanding the lines they've crossed and how their actions will haunt them for a long time.
Told in a traditional manner, this tale would be engaging, but Korine ups the ante and enhances the film with a barrage of visual and spoken styles. Color is explosive early on but eventually settles into a desaturated feel throughout the rest of the film. It's certainly never a boring movie to look at (and for what it's worth, it contains more female nudity than in any movie I've seen in a long time). The most interesting choice is repetition. Entire sentences are spoken more than once, and some as many as six times. On paper, this sounds like it could be irritating, and indeed some may find it so, but there's a point to the madness. Early in the film, Faith states that the reason people are bored and depressed is that they live essentially the same day over and over, experiencing the same things. What none of the girls understand until it's far, far too late is that a life revolving around partying, booze, drugs, and thuggery is every bit as repetitive as something more "normal."
Much has been made of the fact that three of Spring Breakers' actresses are former teen stars shedding their squeaky-clean Disney image, but there's a precedent to this. Anne Hathaway's career followed a similar arc, beginning with family-friendly fare before taking a hard left turn. Selena Gomez doesn't swear like a sailor or bare her breasts (something the other three do on more than one occasion), but she creates a sympathetic character whose absence is felt when she departs mid-way through the movie. James Franco is a revelation. His character and performance is so off-the-wall when compared to anything else in his career that he's unrecognizable. Such is the mark of a skilled performer. Much of the movie's comic relief (including a hilarious "look at my shit" tour of Alien's house) also comes from him. You'll laugh in spite of the disturbing subtext. Finally, solid support is provided by rapper Gucci Mane (as Alien's best-friend-turned-rival, Big Arch) in an underdeveloped subplot.
Spring Breakers is not a film for everyone. Some will deride the filmmakers for being exploitative. Others will claim they're intentionally making an unpleasant film just to prove a point. In spite of all the female nudity, this isn't the sexploitation flick the ads promise. It's darkly dramatic and hard to shake. Those who are willing to step outside the mainstream will find a far more rewarding experience than a movie with such a frothy title has any right to promise.
Rating: ***1/2 stars out of ****
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