Spring Breakers (2013)

The best thing that can be said about Spring Breakers, the latest provocation from professional provocateur Harmony Korine, is that it’s anything but the B-movie that much of the marketing makes it out to be. It may still be little more than a collage of bikinis, drugs and guns, but at least it’s a structurally interesting and beautifully shot collage of bikinis, drugs and guns. As I was watching it, I was constantly distracted by how little care actually went into the story aspect of things, and how repetition is quite nakedly used to disguise the fact that Korine really has to stretch to get this material to feature length. And yet Korine’s pure directorial talent cannot be denied, and even among his usual nonsense he is still able to pull some memorable moments out of thin air. Spring Breakers is that annoying song that still manages to get stuck in your head for days.

Presented like a Terrence Malick film after the lobotomy, Spring Breakers follows a group of four college girls played by Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine (Harmony’s wife) who long to go to Florida for spring break. Unfortunately, they don’t have the money. So they do what any 20-ish-year-old girls would do: rob a diner with fake guns and a sledgehammer. Now that they have the money, they head off to St. Petersburg to par-tay like it’s an MTV special. Eventually they get themselves arrested for drug possession or some such behavior. They spend a brief amount of time in jail still clad in their bikinis, because apparently none of the police officers in Florida ever think “hey, you think we should get these girls some t-shirts?” Through a remarkable stroke of luck, they are bailed out by a local rapper/drug dealer who calls himself Alien (James Franco). He then looks to bring them into his world of professional troublemaking. This leads to mixed results. The most trouble comes from Alien’s competitor and former friend Archie (Gucci Mane).

If this material was directed by, say, Brett Ratner, the resulting film probably would have been interminable. The fact that Spring Breakers is actually quite watchable (if too sluggish at points) says a lot about just how talented a filmmaker Korine actually is. He knows precisely where to put the camera, he shoots things in interesting ways, and the general tone of Spring Breakers admirably straddles a million different lines without leaning too heavily in any one direction. A big part of that is Franco, who thankfully seems to be on the same wavelength as Korine right from the start. If there was any lack of communication there, anything would have fallen apart. His character is the goofiest and most ostensibly detestable dude on the planet, but the way he can sell the most ridiculous scenes (“look at my s—t!”) and the more dramatic scenes in equal measure really saves the whole enterprise. He brings an extra punch to a movie that may not entirely deserve it.

That said, the performances of the central four girls are also all terrific. Much of the Spring Breakers press is going the direction of Gomez and Hudgens because of their history working with a certain Walt Disney corporation, and if this film is to be seen as their first bold step into adult fare then I’d say it’s a success. They both seem like they belong here, and they are able to generate a very convincing rapport with their co-stars Benson and Korine. The casting of the two of them is also quite ingenious, as Gomez fits quite well into the role of the Christian “good girl” while Hudgens is quite convincing as the one of the “wild” girls of the group. This leads to some rather obvious dynamics, inevitably, but Korine does some clever things in the film’s latter half to keep it all from being too predictable.

Speaking of predictability: the sequencing of Spring Breakers is part of the reason it’s far more interesting than it has any right to be, and yet even that occasionally backfires. Not five minutes goes by without Korine playing with the chronology in some way, be it a flashback to a thematically relevant scene or perhaps an evocative flash forward that gives us a peek of what is to come. Sometimes these work. Often they don’t. In particular, I can only think of one particular instance of the flash forward holding any impact. Outside of that, its usual effect amounts to little more than “oh, that’s about to happen. All right.” Again, Korine’s cleverness is only a good thing. But just like almost every decision he’s ever made, I’ve yet to see him consistently use his powers for good.

In fact, he’s been able to put together a whole career based on the idea that he can throw a lot of weird ideas on the screen and call it art. Unfortunately these ideas have never had much coherence. He seems to be shooting for an ultimate meaning, but he certainly is asking the audience to do a lot of the heavy lifting. This is a guy who not long ago shot a no-budget movie entirely on VHS called Trash Humpers. It is about people who hump trash. Spring Breakers is easily the most commercial film he’s ever done—the cast and soundtrack alone will tell you that—but you have to at least somewhat respect a guy who wants to go into the near-mainstream entirely on his own terms. (I say near-mainstream because this movie only opened in sixth place. This ain’t Avatar.) Spring Breakers may not convert many into hardcore Korine fans, but even skeptics like myself have to admit that the skill set of a great director is obviously there. At some point he just needs to find material that's worthy of the style.

Grade: C+