Not your Alien

I can’t see why Harmony Korine wanted to make The Beach Bum, but it’s easy to understand what attracted Matthew McConaughey to the project.

He saw Spring Breakers, marvelled at James Franco’s gonzo performance and thought “I’d like to do that.”

But this is not your Alien, McConaughey. Nor is it your The Dude, which is also in there.

It’s easy to tell that The Beach Bum is from the same director as Spring Breakers. Both films are set in sun-dappled Florida. Both films use a montage approach to the narrative. Both films feature kind of a “pimp lifestyle,” one of which seems appropriate to the subject matter and one of which seems vaguely absurd. Both feature a setting with an outdoor piano, as well as other excesses of the rich. There’s a similar kaleidoscopic color scheme and both films were shot by Benoit Debie. Both films even include a High School Musical alum (Vanessa Hudgens there, Zac Efron here).

Oh, and both feature an over-the-top performance by a character with an outlandish nickname.

In the superior Spring Breakers – which a friend of mine has recently dubbed “Korine’s Citizen Kane” – that character is Alien, played by Franco.

In The Beach Bum, it’s, er, Moondog.

Moondog is played by McConaughey, channeling Franco.

It’s not that Moondog is anything like Alien, in the overt sense. Alien is a drug dealer with corn rows and gold teeth, while Moondog is a stoned space cadet hippie poet. But McConaughey is channeling, or trying to channel, the go-for-broke commitment to a particular character that Franco delivered for Korine in Spring Breakers, imagining that he might carve out his own spot in the cinematic cult character hall of fame.

Nice try, but no.

Moondog is one of the most face-punch-worthy characters I have met in recent memory. He spends all his time in a stupor – sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned – which, miraculously, the other characters consider endearing. He floats around the greater Miami/Florida Keys playing bongo drums amidst semi clad women, constantly smoking joints. He crashes the vows of his own daughter’s wedding – massively underdressed, mind you – in order to grope the groom’s balls in order to prove he’s not man enough, or something. The guests love it. “That crazy Moondog.”

Also, his poetry is shit.

I suppose that’s why some critics have called The Beach Bum an “epic goof.” Then again, some people also thought Korine was punking his audience with Spring Breakers. I pity those people, but they were out there.

Is how I felt watching The Beach Bum how other people felt watching Spring Breakers?

I hope not, because I really wanted to punch this movie in the face, along with its main character.

Of course, I could have wanted to do that with Alien, as Franco’s performance is as stylized and filled with tics in its own way. Except in that case, all the specific wardrobe and hairstyle choices, and curated mannerisms, work. Here, none of them do.

I suppose at this point you might want to take a better look at Moondog. Here he is:

You can probably see why the choices remind me of Alien, in a way. He’s festooned with eccentricities. Probably the most laborious of these is the sunglasses, which are flipped up here. When down, they look more like those sunglasses old people wear, which I guess is meant to provide additional blockage of rays, or possibly help with their glaucoma. When up, he also sometimes wears reading glasses in order to better read his terrible poetry to an adoring audience.

Who knows, maybe he actually has glaucoma, and that’s why he smokes that much weed.

We’re supposed to believe that Moondog was a renowned poet who once made something genuinely great, although old VHS video of him also makes it look like he was once a motivational speaker of some kind, only a tad less wacko than he is now. That’s how he attracted the attention of his wife, a bit of a trainwreck herself but also quite the catch in many respects, played by Isla Fisher. What she would want to do with him, the film never tries to argue. We’re supposed to just believe his blend of carefree free-loving goofiness is an aphrodisiac to everyone he meets. He's kind of like the words used to describe Cosmo Kramer -- "do nothing, fall ass backwards into money, mooch off your neighbors and have sex without dating" -- only without the charisma, and completely insufferable.

The Beach Bum wastes all this time with Moondog without us ever learning what really drives him or why we should care about him. In the end, it has utterly no meaning. People said that about Spring Breakers, but you can see the difference between having no specific viewpoint – i.e., not celebrating or criticizing the behavior you present – and just having no meaning at all.