K-SCORE: 90
Director: Harmony Korine
Starring: James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine
Spoiler Level: Major
I’ve now seen Spring Breakers twice, which, though a challenge, is the minimum number of times you need to watch it in order to appreciate what is going on here. At the core of this film - genius. Allow me to explain.
Spring Breakers is marketed as a film about college girls partying and getting into trouble on spring break. You think perhaps you’ll be delivered a product that’s in the same genre as Project X, Superbad, and Eurotrip, you know - you’re classic Mean Girls Gone Wild. The realization that that’s not what you’re presented with takes a while because the film doesn’t feature any character that is critical of the culture surrounding spring break, the superficiality, and dangerous excess of younger generations. Yet at the heart of Spring Breakers is very much a scathing commentary on the madness present both in the actual activities of late-teens and early twenties people in our country and in the same group’s value system.
In Spring Breakers, four girls go on spring break and immediately take to aggressive partying. From there they get into some minor legal trouble and have to be bailed out by a local gangster named Alien, played by James Franco. His entire life is cluttered with the kinds of things spring breakers claim to idolize - alcohol, drugs, music, sex, flashy cars, and expensive jewelry (that he wears in his teeth in spite of the speech impediment it gives him.) The more they hang out with him, the more they’re roped into a conflict with a rival gang leader. Two of the four come to realize that their initial conception of spring break partying has gotten out of hand. The others, like Alien, embrace the idea that there is no extreme they won’t go to in order to have the spring break they’ve always dreamed.
So, as it gets more serious, the head-bopping thrills of a dance party where girls are ripping their tops off evaporates and is replaced by prison time and murder. If you don’t understand the commentary by then, the notion that we’re far too focused on shallow pursuits and dangerous activities that are genuinely horrifying when taken to extremes, then you’re probably going to be left baffled by the ending. The girls Brit and Candy go with Alien to have a gunfight with the other gangster and Alien is immediately shot in the head and killed, falling dead on the dock. And they walk over his corpse like it means nothing. Then they proceed to massacre everyone else there and drive off into the sunset. WOO! SPRING BREAK!
The temptation to present the film in a way that emphasizes the criticism was strong, but director Korine resisted the temptation and it’s even better for it. The whole movie is a drug-trippy mess of scenes, muddled with music and color, dialogue popping in and out regardless of what characters are actually being shown, timelines blurring together until you can’t possibly put them in chronological order in your mind. Despite the chaos, you get the sense of escalation. Sober, as I watched it, it’s actually rather painful. I can only imagine that inebriated it might be more fun; you’d be tempted to latch onto the actual spring break elements so tantalizingly presented: dancing on the beach at sunset, bodyshots, handcuffed wearing glow-in-the-dark bikinis, sex in the pool, fiddling with guns on the bed. But slowly the horror of what is actually going on would seep in through the cracks in your addled mind. It’s really tremendously clever and an important film.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. This could be an off-color celebration of the culture it presents, suggesting that most partiers just aren’t extreme enough to fucking kill people, which is what really hard core spring breakers do. If that’s the case, I’m only more impressed that Korine, someone who holds that ideology, managed to convince me the film was something else.