I’m not the biggest fan of Harmony Korine. In past reviews, I’ve dropped shade about how I don’t like his depictions of the dregs of society (The homeless, the lower-class, the celebrity impersonators, etc.), but that’s more of a surface-level detail for me; something that makes me hesitant to approach his films, even for a re-watch. What makes me reluctant to rough it out once I start is this vibe I keep getting from his films that I don’t have any use for them, as entertainment or as thematic text. I at least respect films like Ken Park (although that’s mostly for its place in one of my favourite moments of Aussie film critic history), but his habit of lackadaisical narratives just doesn’t work for me. I walked away from Spring Breakers feeling like I didn’t get anything out of the experience, and despite Korine’s best efforts, the same is true for his latest.
Matthew McConaughey is great in this thing as Moondog, though. A modern-day Beat poet slumming it around Florida like he owns the place, he’s carved from the same stone as characters like The Dude; the free-spirited, fun guy you could actually see yourself hanging out with and not regretting a moment of it. He handles his vulgar poetry with such a laidback tone that it feels all-too-natural, and hearing him describe the act of writing certainly sounds true to what I’ve experiencing all month.
The rest of the cast is solid too, from Jonah Hill as his literary agent, to Zac Efron as a panini-faced pyromaniac he meets in rehab (who wins the day by describing Creed’s Higher as “Christian metal”, a statement I’m still giggling at as I write this), to Snoop Dogg as what was originally meant to be himself but became something else in Lingerie, even Isla Fisher as Moondog’s wife works in the few scenes she’s in.
Starting out with this, already being familiar with how much of an afterthought plots end up being in Korine’s filmography, I was prepared to just sit back and vibe with Moondog for an hour and a half. His hedonistic, ‘play with fire without getting burned’ attitude worked for me… at first. But then there’s how the character is treated by the film at large, which is where he stopped being endearing and starting to become annoying. For as little structure as the film ultimately has, the main thing that ties it all together seems to be scenes with other people heaping praise onto Moondog for his writing and his quality as a human being. It’s essentially a writer (Korine) creating his own fictional cheer squad to appraise how good his writing is through a proxy, and while I like Moondog, he’s not that good.
It doesn’t help that, stylistically, this might as well be Spring Breakers Part II. Between the Florida backdrop, the freeloading main characters who only exist for their own thrills (despite all pretences to the contrary), the use of half-naked women as background extras to the point they become set design, and the pointless violence and mayhem the film applies next-to-no framing around, this is basically the same aesthetic but aimed for an older guard. A Jimmy Buffett fan as opposed to a Britney Spears stan, you could say. And while that is fine at first, when the film doesn’t end up doing much with it save for shooting the shit (not literally, but from the guy who made Trash Humpers, it’s not out of the realm of possibility), it doesn’t even make for visual engagement. It’s a fruity cocktail without the needed burn to make the right impact.
This is one of those stoner comedies where that descriptor only applies to the characters themselves, not the style of comedy itself, as this vividly gives the impression of watching people too stoned to make sense ramble on for 90 minutes, only they’re also too stoned to care that they aren’t saying anything worth taking in. As part of Korine’s new-found pop music style as a director, it’s kind of interesting to examine, but it’s far from compelling cinema in the moment, and when centred on a character whose entire M.O. is living for the moment, that’s just not good enough.
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