A little titillation never hurt anyone, right? Well the message of Spring Breakers is actually, it does hurt. Brilliantly crafted for the millennials, Writer/Director Harmony Korine, uses college students’ favorite excursion as a critique on living your life to the fullest. Spring Breakers may end on a positive note, but that does not necessarily mean it is a happy one. Dark, dark times are afoot for the youth of today.
Faith (Selena Gomez) is stuck in a rut. She enjoys her prayer sessions and schooling, but feels like life is never going to change. She tries to save money for spring break so she can get out of town, but she doesn’t have the cash. So her friends Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) decide to bail her out: by robbing a local coffee shop. Their loot is enough to head down to Florida, which seems like a paradise to them. Things take a turn when they get arrested; they get bailed out by a gangster/rapper named Alien (James Franco). Alien’s presence creates tension in the girls’ friendships and the world Alien introduces them to pushes their freedom loving to their personal limits.
Spring Breakers is at its best when it is reinforcing its themes. Korine has always been perceived as being pretentious and that is certainly in evidence here (a gun shot is repeatedly used as a scene transition, which gets grating over time). However, Korine’s biggest point is that a life of freedom and excess just escalates to the point where it will create danger and conflict with another person’s freedom and excess. Scenes, the dubstep score, and conversations of exhilaration and euphoria are repeated as the film takes a dark turn in its second half, where the songs/words take on an eerie ominous vibe. This technique gets more effective as the movie goes on, as it shows how freedom to experience doesn’t always mean good experiences. Eventually, each person will hit their breaking point, and that excess just leads to greater excess to hit the same high. In addition, the sameness experience at home is paralleled Spring Break arena as well, forcing the girls to up the ante when learning more about themselves.
When Alien enters the frame, Spring Breakers turns into a treatise on the youth instead of just a standard exploitation flick. I wasn’t exactly bored watching the first half of the film, but when James Franco’s rapper/gangster enters the frame, he commands Death Star attention like he wants, and Spring Breakers comes darkly alive. James Franco is mesmerizing as Alien. Franco’s monologues are fantastically polarizing; older people will see them as misguided dangerous thought process charismatically presented, while younger people will be riveted by the twisted logic of modern carpe diem by a corn-rows grill wearing wanna be rapper/gangster. The most compelling scene is when the girls put their guns to Franco and he performs an action that encapsulates their collective state of mind. When Franco repeats the same words the girls repeat, they no longer appear cute; the passage of time turns the words into a warning to anyone wanting to live in perpetual arrested development and freedom.
While Franco is from another planet in the acting department for Spring Breakers, the 4 girls are given interesting chances to break out or break from their past. Selena Gomez’s Faith doesn’t completely sever her from her Wizards of Waverly Place past, but it does make her look like a grown up, which is probably what she wants. Her character is the only one that gets a complete back story and arc, one of the weaker points of Spring Breakers. High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens is now officially severed from her past; she is asked to perform a lot of dark acts here, which she chews into with relish. Ditto for Ashley Benson. Rachel Korine is mostly there for the nudity quotient. These girls are interesting; it is a shame that more of a fleshing (pun intended) out of their characters would elevate Spring Breakers into some of the best college movie entries of all time.
“Spring Break. Spring Break. Spring Break Forever.” Said at the beginning of Spring Breakers, that quote sounds like a fantastic way to live. As time goes on, we see from Alien and the girls how misguided those words actually are. Those going into this movie expecting just boobs, drugs, and sex are sadly mistaken. If anything, Spring Breakers makes me want to never go to a bar again and start aggressively investing in my 401(k).