Spring break is a spiritual thing, mostly.
Or at least it is in “Spring Breakers,” Harmony Korine’s latest art film wrapped in provocation. Gathering up the opposite of a ragtag crew with erstwhile Disney innocents Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez, “Pretty Little Liars” star Ashley Benson, his wife Rachel Korine and a freshly cornrowed James Franco, the director’s latest promises shallow fun, at least (appropriately) on the surface.
By most estimations, a spring break romp across Florida featuring a close-knit posse of bikini-clad teen idols and James Franco playing a gangster named Alien doesn’t seem like much of a think piece, save for the caveat that they fund their trip by robbing a diner. And to be fair, the surface pleasures are at times mesmerizing: slow-motion sunshine against MTV wild ones, grainy nights disrupted by neon swimwear, top-40 hits booming to a slideshow of rainbow-tinted debauchery.
Yet there’s always something ponderous going on in the background of this supposed wallow in cheap pleasures, whether it’s the Cliff Martinez (of “Drive” fame) score or the creeping prevalence of gunshots – and it turns out that the whole movie’s a heavy-handed allegory about the cult of youth.
The first warning sign is Selena Gomez’s character, Faith, who, in an ultra-symbolic, eye-rolling way, has faith. (Her friends, Candy, Cotty and Brit, literally don’t have such a burden.) Those fretting for her crispy-clean image need not worry; save for a few shots of her partying – mildly, in comparison to her compatriots – she’s more or less the moral core who is tragically estranged, and is the first to leave the group. While her co-stars are introduced either drawing penises in history lecture or getting high, she’s presented to us as an honest Christian, spring breaking only because she’s tired of the suburbs, a universal emotion if there ever was one.
Gomez’s presence dominates the first half of the film. The relatively innocuous fun is filtered through her eyes: her voiceover repeats over images of camaraderie, her memories repeat in flashback, her objections become clear in flashforward. She weaves a subjective portrait of spring break as an ideal of liberty, full of friends and “sweet people” and great fun – an image that is mostly a fantasy.
Not that there’s a reality to leaven it – merely a countering fantasy anchored by Alien, who, as a much more charismatic core than Faith, draws her friends deeper into amorality. Franco gives the best performance of the movie and perhaps of his career as Alien, whirling from ridiculousness to vulnerability with ease, generating laughs and gasps equally. He also gets the best lines (“I have ‘Scarface’ on repeat!”), and enunciates profanities with such giddy joy it’s infectious.
The allegorical intent is clear in their names: Alien is fun and fresh while Faith is nice enough but boring. The life that Alien symbolizes – where people worship booty, in all senses of the word, rather than God – leads the crew to gangsterdom and downfall.
True to form, Alien’s half of the movie is also more attractive, racking up all the emotional and aesthetic highs in quick succession, reaching its climax with a gorgeous montage of violence and money-grubbing set to a Britney Spears ballad.
Even better is the loving way the movie ends: with the sexiest scene and the most violent scene occurring in quick succession before speeding into determined nihilism, illustrating the film’s thesis. These are surface thrills, irresistible but insupportable – spring break driven to its illogical conclusion.
But the contradiction inherent to “Spring Breakers” is how much the movie revels in these powerful pleasures anyway. It’s an against-all-odds bow at the altar of hedonism, a willful rejection of the plain fact that spring break lasts but a week, maybe two. It’s a fun and foolish prayer for eternal bliss.