SXSW Review: Spring Breakers (2012)
Cast: Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson
Director: Harmony Korine
Country: USA
Genre: Comedy | Crime | Drama
Official Trailer: Here
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is a nightmarish, often hilarious take on the American Dream. It follows the escapades of four college students played by Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine. Desperate to escape the boring confines of college, the four girls eagerly count down the hours until they can flee campus for spring break. There’s just one problem: they don’t have enough money. The girls rob a fast food joint and set out on an endless streak of partyingback without looking.
Korine spends a lot of time focusing on the party scene. Topless girls, booze, drugs, and bad behavior abound. It’s only a matter of time before the fun ends…
Korine spends a lot of time focusing on the party scene. Topless girls, booze, drugs, and bad behavior abound. It’s only a matter of time before the fun ends, and for the girls of Spring Breakers it ends with being thrown in jail. This is where the story really begins. The girls are bailed out and taken under the wing of a local thug named Alien, played by James Franco. Franco’s performance is easily the highlight of the movie. With his dreadlocks and grill, Franco disappears into his role and brings a lot of welcome laughs to the movie.
The more time the girls spend with Alien, the darker the movie gets. They soon find themselves involved in a life of crime, which excites some of the girls more than it does others. The effect the life of crime has on the girls isn’t really as explored as I would have liked it to have been. This is mostly because the girls, with the exception of one of two simple characteristic traits, all blend together. None of them are especially memorable, and they really have to be for this kind of movie to work. Why do certain characters decide to stay when others can’t wait to leave? With the exception of Selena Gomez’s character, none of the girls are really given backstories. Are we even supposed to care about these characters?
It’s a frightening notion and a great statement by a director who clearly had something to say and succeeded in saying it.
Having never seen a Harmony Korine film, his style was a bit hard to get used to at first. Spring Breakers has a fairly linear structure, but certain scenes are repeated over and over again as a way to drive points home. Most of the time it isn’t really clear what the point is that’s being driven home, making this exercise succeed in nothing but amp up the running time.
Throughout the film, the four girls call their relatives back home and tell them that they are having the time of their lives. They’ve really found themselves, and they finally feel like they are actually doing something with their lives. This is where the movie truly shines, where it feels like Korine actually has something to say. The girls are so taken in by the money, drugs, and material possessions that Alien makes available to them that they readily turn to a life of crime and abandon their education. It’s a frightening notion and a great statement by a director who clearly had something to say and succeeded in saying it. Korine isn’t always successful in painting his vision of the party generation, but when he does succeed he does so with flying colors.
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