PLOT: A zoned-out Florida Keys poet, Moondog (Matthew McConaughey) finds himself pulled from his life of luxury and forced to become self-sufficient for the first time in years. But will a lack of money and enablers mean he won’t be able to keep having a good time?
REVIEW: By this point, if you walk into a Harmony Korine movie, you should prepare yourself for an oddball odyssey. Let’s face it, SPRING BREAKERS was an off-the-wall movie, and that was by far his most accessible work to date. THE BEACH BUM continues his very slow transition towards the mainstream with another gonzo movie about partying in Florida, albeit in a far less violent and sinister way. Matthew McConaughey’s titular beach bum, Moondog, just wants to have a good time – but for the most part, he’s relatively well-meaning providing the company’s alright, alright, alright.
One’s gotta hand it to McConaughey, who leans into the public’s stereotyped image of him as a bongo-playing, weed-smoking dude who’s stone free baby, although this image has changed significantly over the past few years, which has seen his reinvention as a legit, Academy Award-winning actor. Had THE BEACH BUM come along a few years ago, maybe McConaughey wouldn’t have been secure enough to make it, but here it is. Korine’s movie is something akin to an art-house version of a Cheech & Chong movie, were Cheech a revolving door of stars having fun, including Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Martin Lawrence, Snoop Dogg and even Jimmy Buffett (as himself).
Many will find this a tedious ninety minutes, but if you can get on Korine and Moondog’s wavelength, there’s a lot of fun to be had. The first act is hit and miss, with my initial thought being that the two leaned too far into Moondog’s zonked-out bliss to make him a compelling character, but once the supporting cast starts to assert itself, THE BEACH BUM starts to really work. The genius of Moondog is more the way he plays off others than anything else, as he’s too vacant to really be on his own. Whether or not he’s really supposed to be much of a poet is left ambiguous, with him essentially the beloved pet of his long-suffering, impossibly rich wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher), who lets him play around with the locals in Key West while holding down the fort in Miami. Both ascribe to the free-love mentality that suggests at least Moondog is an aging hippie (look for a calendar in a bodega that sets the date as 1999- which would allow Moondog, if he were about fifty, to be something of a relic of that era).
Basically, he’s called home to his daughter’s wedding, but a surprise turn of events leaves him in rehab and on his own – briefly. It’s here that Zac Efron comes in and utterly steals the movie as the wired Flicker, a heavy-metal loving Christian who loves to wreak havoc and do drugs because if Jesus died for our sins, we can do whatever we want, right? He’s so good that once his little episode is over, we kinda want him to come back into the plot, but Korine uses him sparingly. His other episodes, including some time with a coked-up dolphin charter boat operator played by Martin Lawrence, and his sweaty southern attorney (Jonah Hill) are all amusing enough, but they pale next to the crazy Efron segment.
McConaughey seems to be having a whale of a time throughout, so good in fact that one wonders if he and Snoop (as his friendly rival for the affections of Fisher’s Minnie) are smoking “movie” weed or the real deal. I’m inclined to think the latter – because if not these guys deserve Oscars for how convincingly they play stoned.
If you’re expecting something linear or with a conventional plot, don’t bother with THE BEACH BUM, you’ll likely hate it. But, if you like Korine’s stuff and were a fan of SPRING BREAKERS, it’s more than likely you’ll at least have as much fun as I did with this. It’s a weird little trip but worth taking.