REVIEWS
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 61
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum is a
superannuated party animal’s utopian fantasy of
splashing in the Fountain of Youth, imagining an
endless summer existence where the PBR tall boys
are always ice cold, there’s always time enough
to sleep off any hint of a hangover, and all of it
never, finally, gets sad. The film’s central character
is what used to be called a ‘tramp poet’ – à la W.H.
Davies and Vachel Lindsay – played by Matthew
McConaughey, who goes by the name of Moondog.
At the beginning of the film, Moondog, wandering
in a blissily inebriate haze along a Key West
marina, picks up and adopts a fluffy white kitten.
By the end of the film, enough has transpired that
one might justifiably presume that more than a
year has passed, but the kitten is still a fluffy kitten.
McConaughey’s character takes his name from
the great American eccentric Moondog, a blind
musician and poet who for decades could be seen
wearing a horned helmet on New York’s Sixth^
Avenue. The sartorial taste of the film’s Moondog
runs more towards two-piece loungewear in loud
matching prints, fanny packs and bejewelled Uggs.
Tanned and tawny, with the physique of an ex-
athlete gone to seed and a bloodhound nose for the
nearest line of coke, Moondog evokes the shaggy
McConaughey of the 1999 nude bongo arrest in
Austin. If his agent is to be believed, Moondog
used to be quite successful with his writing. There
is, however, no particular reason to put faith in
Moondog’s agent, as the performance by Jonah
Hill, sporting a plummy bayou accent, is literally
unbelievable – though verisimilitude has never
precisely been Korine’s strong suit. In one of the
film’s final scenes, Moondog accepts a Pulitzer
Prize at a function that would look low-rent if it
were meant to be a Man of the Year Ceremony
for the Fort Lauderdale Better Business Bureau. If
Korine feels pressure following up his crossover
cult hit Spring Breakers (2012), he doesn’t show it
in The Beach Bum, which is relaxed and ambling
to the point of moribundity, though jolted to
life briefly by the presence of Zac Efron, playing
the JNCO-jeans-clad pyromaniac that Moondog
meets during a court-appointed stint in rehab.
In Spring Breakers, a quartet of college girls
vacation in St Petersburg, Florida, dabbling in
crime and even killing before returning to their
old lives without facing consequences for their
actions. Some took this for satire of scot-free white
American privilege run rampant, others just dug
the mood of the thing. The Beach Bum, very much
another mood piece, suggests that the latter is
nearer to Korine’s intention: he likes people who
get away clean, who walk away unscathed from
catastrophe after catastrophe. In most movies,
Moondog’s rehab stay, ordered after he leads a Zéro
de conduite-style raid on the manse he’s been locked
out of, would initiate a period of self-analysis and
change. In The Beach Bum, it’s just one stopover
in this middle-aged picaresque hero’s journey,
granted a tropical shimmer and palette of colours
usually only seen in boardwalk frozen drinks by
Spring Breakers cinematographer Benoît Debie.
It is abundantly clear that Moondog doesn’t
need to change because, per the testimony of so
many people around him, Moondog is awesome,
Moondog is a genius with a big ol’ dick and, finally,
Moondog knows what’s best for Moondog.
The nearest hint of a storm cloud to cross
the clear cerulean sky of his charmed life is a
drunk-driving accident that takes the life of his
wildly wealthy wife Minnie (Isla Fisher), but even
here Moondog is basically in the clear – it was a
boozed-up Minnie who was behind the wheel,
and so our hero escapes the worst of the guilt.
When Moondog first shows up to their manorial
estate after a month’s worth of down-and-outer
long weekends in the Keys, he plonks down at
the piano and plays like a prodigy, and there’s no
sense of dislocation in his traversing between
class strata in the manner of Jack Nicholson’s
Robert Dupea in Five Easy Pieces (1970). And
whereas Abel Ferrara’s superb recent films about
working artists – Pasolini (2014) and Tommaso
(2019) – heavily emphasise the working aspect,
Korine gives us the artist as natural-born, a sybarite
who effortlessly excretes poetry. There is no
joyousness in the filmmaking here to express the
joy of life that Moondog espouses – it’s a work
more of lackadaisical enervation than luxuriant
laziness – though there is a certain integrity in
making a movie about a layabout wastrel that’s
so lacking any sense of urgency. The Beach Bum
makes the act of making a movie, indeed, of life
itself, look easy – a degree of chill that feels at
times an awful lot like slack indifference.
US, the present. Tramp poet Moondog lives a footloose
existence of drink, drugs and womanising in the
Florida Keys. A call from his wealthy wife Minnie, who
is secretly having affair with his friend Lingerie, brings
him back to their Miami villa to witness the marriage
of their daughter Heather. Following the wedding,
after Moondog finds out about Minnie’s affair, he
and Minnie go for a drunken drive; Minnie, who is at
the wheel, is killed in an ensuing crash. Minnie’s will
dictates that Moondog must finish his book of poetry
before receiving his part of her estate. Instead, he
recruits a gang of homeless men to trash her villa; he
is arrested and sent to rehab for 12 months. Breaking
out of the rehab facility with a pyromaniac named
Flicker, Moondog resumes his wild ways. After a brief
interlude with dolphin tour specialist Captain Wack,
Moondog reconnects with Lingerie, who confesses to
the affair and helps him return to Key West. Moondog
completes his book, titled ‘The Beach Bum’, and wins
the Pulitzer Prize. He requests that his inheritance
be sent to him via boat, in cash. When the fortune
arrives, he sets the boat alight, then floats to safety
in a lifeboat, heading for his next adventure.
The Beach Bum
USA/France/United Kingdom/Switzerland 2017
Director: Harmony Korine
Certificate 18 94m 20s
Produced by
John Lesher
Charles-Marie
Anthonioz
Mourad Belkeddar
Nicolas Lhermitte
Written by
Harmony Korine
Director of
Photography
Benoît Debie
Film Editor
Douglas Crise
Production Designer
Elliott Hostetter
Music
John Debney
Sound Mixer
Scott Clements
Costume Designer
Heidi Bivens
©Beach Bum Film
Holdings LLC
Production
Companies
Neon and Vice
Studios, Riverstone
Pictures, SPK
Pictures, Rocket
Science presents
an Iconoclast,
Anonymous Content,
Le Grisbi production
A film by Harmony
Korine
Executive Producers
Karl Spoerri
Marc Schmidheiny
Deepak Nayar
Thorsten
Schumacher
Chiara Gelardin
Will Weiske
Emmeline Yang
Hankins
Eddy Moretti
Shane Smith
Danny Gabai
Cast
Matthew
McConaughey
Moondog
Snoop Dogg
Lingerie
Isla Fisher
Minnie
Stefania Lavie Owen
Heather
Zac Efron
Flicker
Martin Lawrence
Captain Wack
Jonah Hill
Lewis
Dolby Atmos
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Blue Finch Film
Releasing
Sand man: Matthew McConaughey
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 4
