Spring Breakers (2013)

★★★½
Did Harmony Korine ever attend spring break? I wondered that as I watched Spring Breakers, a movie that could be seen either as an exaggerated account from someone who absorbed the imagery of spring break through years of watching spring break movies or an accurate on-location report from a real spring break gathering but amped up to highlight the hedonistic nature of the annual event. Someone could come away with either interpretation or maybe another that I haven't considered yet. Korine is a cinematic wild child who doesn't shy away from excess, so the spring break setting is the perfect place for him to indulge in his tendencies. He walks a tight rope here, and this time he pulls it off. I've seen Gummo, which featured a fragmented narrative about the residents of a poor town, though it was unsatisfactory because his camera was more fascinated with behavior than providing any insight into that behavior. The unreliable narrator seemed to distance him and us from his subjects.

Not so with Spring Breakers. Though I wouldn't go so far as to call Korine a concerned citizen, I think he is perplexed with how future academics, subject matter experts, scholars and engineers could engage in debauchery for a week then return to school and attend classes ranging from STEM and pre-med to law, the humanities and other such disciplines. To highlight this observation, his movie features college pals Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Faith (Selena Gomez), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine). They travel to spring break in St. Petersburg (after three of them rob a restaurant to fund the trip) and immediately immerse themselves in the drug- and alcohol-fueled festivities where the kegs never dry up and the raves last well into the night. After a day of partying, the four are arrested for disturbing the peace and wind up in jail, where they have the option of either making bail or spending the rest of the week in a cell.

Fortune smiles upon them when gangster Alien (James Franco) bails them out. He takes them to a seedy part of the city that is having its own celebration parallel to the mainstream action at the beach. Call it the anti-spring break. There are no college students here. These are the local gangsters and drug dealers who are in an endless loop of decadence without the means or desire to end it. It is spring break stripped of the M.T.V. cameras (do those still show up?), security patrols, curfews and that little bit of humanity clinging to the more civilized surroundings of campus life. Faith recognizes this sudden shift in locations. She laments "this isn't what we signed up for." She expresses her hesitation to proceed and firmly tells Alien where she stands on the matter. When we first meet her, she's attending a Christian youth group. Though we detect faltering commitment from her, she eventually recognizes the slippery slope from harmless fun in the sun to full-blown profligacy. Her faith is a wakeup call.

Alien eventually recruits the girls into his feud with rival gangster Big Arch (Gucci Mane). Alien is a former protégé whose influence has grown and encroaches into Big Arch's territory. After a strangely beautiful musical piece featuring the girls in pink ski masks, Alien stages a confrontation against his nemesis that tests how far the elastic band can be stretched before it snaps back. The antics at the beach are insane, but they are superficial. Whatever Korine might think of spring breakers and their hard partying, I don't believe he thinks the experience will cause any harm to a vast majority of attendees. Candy, Brit and Cotty are outliers, hence why they drift to the periphery and eventually accompany Alien in his quest to rid himself of Big Arch. They already committed armed robbery before meeting Alien. They sink deeper into the abyss through their association with him, yet will they follow their fellow spring breakers back to dorm life, study halls and classwork?

The ending suggests that they hope to reintegrate into the student body, if Candy's phone calls back home are any indication. It makes me wonder how many of my classmates were cokeheads. The four actresses give gritty performances. Selma Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens are cast against type (they're former Disney actresses) by playing such degenerate characters. Faith and Candy are not misled. They are not naïve. They know what they're doing by gravitating towards Alien and his ilk. Though Faith begins to worry about her safety, she still is friendly with the other girls and bids them a fond farewell with the clear intention of continuing their friendship back at school. I'm not as familiar with the other two actresses, but they are up to the task. James Franco gives an intense performance as the menacing Alien. It is the best work he's ever done. He goes all in with the bravado of someone from the wrong side of the tracks.

Spring Breakers tackles the same subject matter as Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction (2002), which also features drug-addicted and wayward students in higher education. I give the edge to Avary's film. He benefited from the source material (Bret Easton Ellis's novel) and added the kind of cinematic flair he displayed as the director of Killing Zoe. Harmoney Korine doesn't go for comedy here. He sees this annual event, probably wishes he took part in it and shows how seamless it is for students to get drunk together regardless of where they fall on the G.P.A. scale. Most will just bask in the sunlight uneventfully. Many will need to be carried back to their motel rooms. Some will do hard drugs. In a perfect world, nobody will return to school with bloody hands, but Korine isn't so optimistic.

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