Review: Spring Breakers (2012)

March 16, 2013 Approved By NP, Reviews 1 Comments

Cast: Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson
Director: Harmony Korine
Country: USA
Genre: Comedy | Crime | Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: If you’ve already seen Spring Breakers we’d love to hear your thoughts on it, or if you’re looking forward to seeing it this weekend, please tell us in the comments section below or in our new Next Projection Forums.

Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s (Trash Humpers, Mister Lonely, Julien Donkey-Boy, Gummo, Kids) latest film, opens with images of pulsating, gyrating male and female twenty-something bodies under an ultra-bright Florida sun to the throbbing, sensory-pummeling sounds of dubstep pioneer Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites.” The bodies belong to America’s best and brightest on spring break, a euphemism for the annual ritual and bacchanal (i.e., getting their libido-driven freak on). Seemingly exploitative, the images repeat themselves, video or art installation style. Korine uses the repetition of images and sounds, of scenes and dialogue not just to create a sense of events turning back on and encircling the characters in their respective fates, or even a pervasive sense of amorality, but just as importantly, a critique of the mass culture the character and, by extension, we inhabit, and how we, as moviegoers, take the cinema’s visual and auditory pleasures for granted without reflection or reservation.

Korine uses the repetition of images and sounds, of scenes and dialogue not just to create a sense of events turning back on and encircling the characters in their respective fates…

Spring Breakers centers on four southern college students, Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), Cotty (Rachel Korine), and Faith (Selena Gomez), bored and/or restless to varying degrees. Korine introduces Candy and Brit in a history class, writing vulgar notes to each other and ignoring the instructor’s discussion of the Civil Rights Era. For Candy and Brit, avatars for twenty-somethings everywhere (maybe), there’s no reason to reflect on the past, let alone relive it second-hand in a college history class. Only the present counts and what you do with it. In their case, the present involves getting stoned, drinking alcohol, and planning spring break with Cotty and Faith, a good evangelical Christian girl eager to take a walk on the girls gone wild side with her friends.

When Candy and Brit realize they’re short on money for their trip, they don’t get a second part-time job (or a first one) or call their parents or relatives. They grab their squirt guns and ski masks, steal a professor’s car, and get Cotty to play getaway driver while they rob a low-end diner. It’s like a movie or video game to them, a consequence-free bit of fun. Taking a page from Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, Korine shoots the robbery from inside the car, with the diner’s windows functioning as windows or screens within screens, emphasizing the unreal nature of the girl’s actions (or rather their perception of that behavior). It’s just fun and games until someone gets their eye shot out or someone almost loses an arm to a drive-by shooting by an angry drug dealer’s henchman.

Not surprisingly, spring break meets each and every one of the girls’ expectations: alcohol- and drug-fueled partying morning, noon, and night, with the occasional foray through town on scooters. A wrong place, wrong time scenario gets the four girls busted for drug possession, leading to an overnight stay in the local jail. With a two-day jail sentence ahead, their spring break looks like a bust until Alien (a career-best James Franco), a cornrowed, metal-mouthed rapper/gangsta wannabe pays their respective fines. Alien introduces the girls to his version of the thug life. Alien has taken movies, specifically Oliver Stone’s 1982 Scarface remake (Alien claims he has on it repeat), and video games into a blueprint for living. Alien promises a far more dangerous, potentially fatal encounter with the criminal underworld for the girls than they imagined.

Spring Breakers may just be Korine’s most accessible film due to the subject matter and former Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez sandblasting their one-time chaste teen personas…

Spring Breakers may just be Korine’s most accessible film due to the subject matter and former Disney stars Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez sandblasting their one-time chaste teen personas, but Korine only goes so far, embracing a non-linear approach, sometimes skipping ahead for a shot or scene, sometimes flashing back, often using voiceover narration as counterpart or for dramatic irony. Echoing the first scene, Korine often replaces diegetic sound or dialogue with Skrillex’s music or Cliff Martinez’s ambient-flavored electronic score to create a lyrical, oneiric feel. A shot of bloody hands, guns, and a piano works as traditional foreshadowing, while the girls’ phone calls reveals their willful vapidity and their willingness to lie, describing their Florida experience in the most banal, practiced way possible. It’s no accident they use similarly soothing words to their offscreen parents. The less those offscreen parents know, the better for both the parents and their daughters. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it’s better than the alternative.

At least superficially, Spring Breakers functions as exploitation, but it also functions as a critique of our narcissistic, egocentric, sensation-seeking, consequences-ignoring culture. If that sounds like a statement a social conservative might embrace, that’s because it probably is. Then again, Korine’s always been a professional provocateur, interested in jarring or upsetting audiences away from their comfortable, consumption-oriented lives. If Korine’s takeaway message is an inherently conservative one, it’s by default, not because Korine explicitly expresses one. By the time the two remaining spring breakers make their Day-Glo tinted exit from Florida, there’s little, actually no, evidence that they’ve changed personally typical of a mainstream film. They’re just as self-absorbed and egocentric in the closing scene as they were when we first met them in a college history class.

90/100 ~ AMAZING. At least superficially, Spring Breakers functions as exploitation, but it also functions as a critique of our narcissistic, egocentric, sensation-seeking, consequences-ignoring culture.

By Mel Valentin

Mel Valentin hails from the great state of New Jersey. After attending NYU undergrad (politics and economics double major, religious studies minor) and grad school (law), he made the move, physically, mentally, and spiritually to California, specifically San Francisco. Mel's written more than 1,400 film-related reviews and articles. He's a member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle.