Spring Breakers

If you were to tell me that I would be insanely excited for a movie starring Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, I would think you were a crazy person. If you told me I would be insanely excited for a movie set during Spring Break, I would again think you were a crazy person. Yet, that is exactly what happened. When the film premiered last year, there were so many reviews talking about how great it was, or how awful it was. There was no in between whatsoever. When a movie generates those intense feelings on either side, chances are I am going to definitely be excited about it. As trailers started premiering, the movie started to just look bonkers. It appeared to be a movie about young, hot Disney girls doing drugs, having sex and shooting people while lit by bright neon colors and scored to Dub Step music. The Red Band trailers were stupid awesome. Whispers were starting about James Franco as a possible Best Supporting Actor nominee for his portrayal as a white thug drug dealer. He had cornrows and a grill! James Franco was rocking a grill! I had not idea if the movie would be a brilliant film, or a complete and utter disaster, but I knew I was starting to get more excited than I should be considering who is in it.

Faith (Gomez), Candy (Hudgens), Brit (Pretty Little Liars' bombshell Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Director's wife Rachel Korine) are four girls from a small town who dream of spending Spring Break in the sweaty, gorgeous Daytona Beach Florida. They have been friends since grade school and they are all miserable. They are searching for something more, and they believe they will find meaning on Spring Break. Faith also searches for it in in God, but they are all searching for where they belong and they do know they are not finding it in their normal college experience. Candy and Brit get a brilliant idea of how they can get enough money to truly go on spring break and live the good life. They enlist Cotty's help because they need a vehicle. With a squirt gun, ski masks and a hammer, the girls rob a diner and get away with it. They make their way south and end up partying like crazy for spring break. Eventually they are arrested for drugs on spring break, but they are bailed out by a creepy looking guy who goes by Alien (Franco). Alien is smitten by these four gorgeous bikini clad babes, but Faith is incredibly uncomfortable and soon leaves for home. It was the right call because soon the girls are caught up in a turf war between Alien and his rival Archie.

It is weird to think of Spring Breakers as an Art House Film, but it really is. Harmony Korine (director) has a reputation for incredibly inaccessible films and Spring Breakers is his coming out party to the mainstream, but that does not mean the film is mainstream. For me, Spring Breakers is one of those borderline genius movies that I cannot recommend to very many people because the appeal is going to be limited. The entire film is shot gorgeously, even in the depravity. The cinematography captures every gorgeous setting, every perfectly framed back light and of course, the camera knows how to make four gorgeous girls in bikinis look stunning while still capturing the sadness of everything. I am dying to see the shoot script, because I am curious as to how it looks. Spring Breakers is barely a narrative. It is not exactly non-linear, but it is not exactly linear either. There is minimal dialog. Instead, we have multiple long monologues or phone calls that acts as narration over scenes or montages. In fact, Spring Breakers often feels like a series of montages, set to repeated phrases and a booming, slick Dub Step soundtrack provided by Skrillex. There are lengthy shots of the girls staring off into the distance, or the girls goofing around in the halls of their dorms, and repeated shots of the girls riding scooters as they make calls home calling this the best experience of their lives.

If you are looking for the debauchery of spring break, there is plenty of that as well. The film opens with lots of shots of college girls flashing their tits, people grinding on each other, and just when you think everything is meant to be titillating, they will throw in a shot of a bunch of topless girls on the ground while guys pour beer on them from cans down by their junk, pretending to urinate on the girls. The film is clearly making a case that the debauchery is not titillating, it is starkly depraved and incredibly depressing. Spring break, as perpetrated by MTV for the last 15 years, has become a place where college kids become the most hedonistic versions of themselves. It is where they go to be anyone else and they do things they believe will not really follow them home. Spring Break is where Girls Gone Wild was born. It bred a culture of college kids doing anything they wanted as they searched to relax from the trials of college. Here, though, it is presented as just another form of the sadness in the lives of unfulfilled young people. The girls appear to be having the time of their lives, but nothing in the film really says that.

Spring Breakers really takes off when Franco is introduced. The guy is, without hyperbole, phenomenal. He embodies Alien without hesitation and without vanity. There is a scene between him, Hudgens, Benson and two pistols that will make it clear that he was going all in this film. Alien is a posturing, scary, wanna-be thug, who, at his core, is incredibly depressed. When he says "Spring Break Forever" he does not say it with enthusiasm. He says it with this lingering sadness. The man has money, drugs, an insane gun collection, a hit rap single and he is still searching for something to make him whole. He has created this thug character, but it is pretty clear early on that Alien is just a facade. He is not the thug he presents and he is a scared boy who just wants these girls to love him. Franco brings out the themes of loneliness, emptiness, and searching to such full revelation in every moment he is on screen. Gomez, Hudgens, Benson and Korine are serviceable, with Benson and Hudgens going to the very depths of their souls to bring out just how depraved their characters are. Gomez is out centerpiece for the first half, so it is a bit jarring when she exits the picture after the first half, but I think that is the point. For the first half, as scary, debauched and sad it is, we have this Faith character who is actually trying. We believe she will come out of this alright, and when she leaves, we are left with these three girls who are down for everything.

Spring Breakers is also excellently shot, especially the exterior tracking shot of the robbery. We have the slow point of view of Cotty, the driver, so we do not hear anything in the diner, so when they go back and show us what happened on the inside, it is that much more intense. When they show us what happened in the diner, it is cut with the girls reliving the robbery to Faith, and it is terrifying. It is scary, not because it is actually scary, but scary because these girls really believe they are that tough. They believe they are these people who take guns and rob people and they show no remorse. In fact, Brit, Candy and Cotty are turned on by it. Candy and Brit especially are turned on by the violence and the guns. This becomes more clear during some darkly hilarious, but downright scary moments with the Alien character. The soundtrack, which I mentioned helps sell the movie, but because the entire soundtrack is Dub Step, it makes one scene that uses a Britney Spears song, even more perfect. Franco's complete lack of irony as he sits at the piano and sings out the ballad "Every Time" creates this moment where you are not sure if laughter is what you are supposed to do, but you realize that is the point. The movie generates seriously uncomfortable moments of dark humor, but the montage/scene set to this song create the most uncomfortable of laughs, but that is only if you understand the film. It will probably go over the heads of so many people.

Spring Breakers is not for everyone, but here I am nearly a week later and it is still something I think about multiple times a day. I feel like this review has only captured my most surface thoughts on how I feel about the movie and what I think the movie is trying to do. It is not the deconstruction of Disney Princesses like I thought it would be. It is operating on a whole other level. I believe the film succeeds with any four young attractive actresses, if I am being completely honest. yes, it is jarring to see Selena Gomez smoking, and to see Vanessa Hudgens snort cocaine takes some getting used to, but I think it would work with other actresses. I will say this, the threesome scene generating controversy is jarring for a number of reasons. First, it is oddly intimate for this kind of film. There is no nudity minus bare asses, so it does not really feel exploitative or particularly erotic, but there is a rawness to it that borders on erotic. However, what jarred me the most about it was how separate from the film it felt, and how necessary it felt to me. For a moment before the truly depraved, depressing sociopath-like climax, the entire picture slows down and does its version of romance. It is not romantic, but for these characters, in this setting, with the finale looming over them, it is actually romance for them. It might be the only moment of the film where the characters do not feel the void of emptiness.

If you are expecting something tidy and clean, do not go see this film. It will leave you with lingering thoughts of sadness. It will make you wonder about who these people are and it will make you wonder how the characters truly feel change when it is over. It does not offer answers to any of these questions. It is clear that something snapped in a few of the characters and perhaps spring break offered a few of them the truths they were seeking, even if to the audience, those truths are truly frightening. Spring Breakers will probably end up on my top 10 for the year, and it is a movie I will probably want to discuss with every person I know who sees it, but I am not recommending it to anyone, because my guess, there are tons of people who will see it and loathe everything about it. It does not promote drugs, violence, promiscuous sex or robbery, but the condemning of it does not exactly happen either. For those expecting to be titillated, it will disappoint you as well. yes, the girls look great prancing around in various bikinis for 80% of the movie, and there are tons of naked girls throughout, it really all comes off as sad, which is exactly the point.