There isn’t much I
hate more than a lazy filmmaker who just choreographs a lot of debauchery, lets
a trendy cinematographer shoot it however he wants, and then hands it over to
an editor to go completely overboard with coloring and other distracting
effects. And that filmmaker is Harmony
Korine, the genius behind Gummo (1997)
and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) so long
ago that made him a flavor-of-the-month junior auteur and who’s done nothing
else of note since. I guess there’s
something inherently stimulating about the premise of spoiled rich girls
flirting with the dark underbelly of society and getting their inevitable comeuppance,
but haven’t we seen this in several hundred other movies? Spring
Breakers is a Lifetime Channel special dolled up in art-film pretensions; a
teen sex romp masquerading as exposé, complete with a fatal dearth of
humor. A dearth of intentional humor, that is; there are many moments that are so
ridiculous – (all four shapely heroines in bikinis for a court appearance,
James Franco serenading his masked girl posse with a Britney Spears song) –
that the film might become a future camp favorite like Showgirls, because (to paraphrase Robert Hughes) nothing dates
faster than contemporary delusions about what’s cutting-edge. I was always sympathetic with Korine’s snotty
contempt for Hollywood methods, but he hasn’t evolved beyond
that. In fact, he’s become just as
dependent on clichés as the mainstream movies he hates so much. The formula – shared with Larry Clark, for
whom he wrote Kids (1996) and the foul
Ken Park (2002) – is essentially to
show very young and attractive people doing everything that will guarantee a
film a hard R or light NC-17 rating. I
have no idea why any unknown actors work with Korine or Clark voluntarily,
because (save only for Chloë Sevigny) they are exploited graphically and then
never heard from again. There is no
emotion in Spring Breakers, just a
lot of surface affectations that are supposed to seem cool and deflect your
attention away from the cornball plot and performances. None of the characters are compelling; they’re
just airheads doing one retarded thing after another. I couldn’t wait for them all to die, but I
did for some reason, and I was mostly disappointed. All I have to say is that if Korine is such a
genius, let him apply his cinematic philosophy to a stripped-down story – free
of his safety nets of sensation, sexy actors and editorial gimmicks – and see
if the result is of any interest. David
Lynch did this to his everlasting credit with The Straight Story. I
suspect that Korine, in spite of all his loud bluster, is nowhere near as
brave.
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