The Beach Bum

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Martin Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Stefania LaVie Owen

Director: Harmony Korine

I watched The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine’s new movie, at an Arclight Q&A event featuring Korine, as well as Matthew McConaughey, who plays the titular bum, and Stefania LaVie Owen, who plays the bum’s daughter. Someone asked McConaughey what the biggest challenge in playing Moondog was. His response, after a bit of thought (dude was high as a kite, as was Korine), was that the hardest part of playing Moondog was being Moondog. “Once I was able to get into the wavelength, though,” McConaughey said, “I was locked in.”

“What was that wavelength?” the moderator replied.

“Joy,” McConaughey said, in addition to “never giving crisis credit,” and being almost ruthless in his desire to be entertained. “The biggest challenge was just occupying that space for the next eight months.”

“Months?” someone said.

“Oh right; weeks,” McConaughey replied, giggling.

That exchange really sums up the movie, which I think you’re either going to love or you’re going to regard with a kind of mild disdain. The same can be said for Moondog himself, a poet who wanders Key West in an Idyllic haze. The man is the embodiment of Dionysus himself, a bacchanal reveler who in McConaughey’s own words never seems to suffer a hangover. We never see him throwing up, never see him getting anxious. The man is a living trickster god, ambling about in search of a good time and little else. He never seems to run out of cash, and at the very least this last part can be explained.

Moondog is a bum in lifestyle, but in station he is–if not the top 1 percent–then definitely the top 10 percent. This is 100 percent due to his affluent wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher), who lives in her fabulous Miami mansion while Moondog does his business elsewhere. Their relationship is “open” in that classic heterosexual way where they never explicitly said it was, but in practice it is. Minnie’s side piece is none other than rapper and ordained minister Lingerie, nicknamed Ray (Snoop Dogg was originally supposed to just play himself, but Snoop felt this was inauthentic, and came up with the name one night. Are you going to be the one to tell Snoop Dogg no? Harmony Korine and Matthew McConaughey aren’t).

Ray has become ordained to join Moondog and Minnie’s daughter, Heather (Stefania LaVie Owen) in holy matrimony to a nameless fellow that Moondog simply calls Limp Dick (Joshua Ritter is credited as "groom–Heather’s husband"). This event finally calls Moondog home, and kicks off the plot’s inciting incident, a sequence of startlingly haunting emotional strength that I’d rather no spoil. What results of that is that Moondog is now, legally, persona non grata at Minnie’s mansion, and must finish his great American novel (anyone want to guess what its title will be?), or he will wind up a bum in totality; completely cut off, with no safety net.

If you’re worried we’re going to have to watch McConaughy slowly dwindle in a fluorescent rehab facility for the rest of the movie, think again. Despite some of the unexpected tragedy that the first act’s inciting incident brings, Moondog is unfazed, and when an addled preacher’s kid gone bad (Zach Efron) suggests they break out of the rehab facility, Moondog tells him to say no more, and shatters their window.

What follows is a Huck Finn style series of vignettes and misadventures, wherein Moondog will find someone who interests him, and sticks around until his companion is no longer of interest to him. Standouts are a sequence reminiscent of Voodoo lore, in which Moondog leads a parade of homeless men into Minnie’s vacant home, trashing the place and claiming it as their own until the cops arrive, as well as bit featuring Martin Lawrence that’s funny and absurd from beginning to shockingly violent end.

If you saw the trailer, you already know if The Beach Bum is for you or if it’s not. I’m not always a fan of the stoner movie, as I’m a virgin when it comes to the ganj myself, but to me Korine’s work always transcends its apparent aesthetic. It has the same foibles of a lot of stoner party movies–women never fully get to have character or much fun beyond being topless props for Moondog to giggle into. Minnie is the exception to this, but she isn’t onscreen for much longer than Martin Lawrence in the movie. Moondog’s daughter, too, is stuck in the sometimes thankless role of the Voice of Reason, although she does have one of the best lines in the movie, delivered to her newly-wedded husband, Limp Dick:

“[Moondog’s] brilliant. That’s why mom let him get away with so much. You’re not brilliant. But you’re dependable.”

I was reminded at points in the movie of Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film, Paterson, starring Adam Driver in a role that on the outside seems very different from Moondog’s, but in structure and feeling ends up being kind of similar. Both men are poets, both men experience the noumenal phenomenon of kintsugi, which looks at breaking and repairing as part of the art instead of a flaw. The Beach Bum has more goofs than a Jarmusch film, more laughs and giggles, but there’s a similar level of relaxation that I found. Moondog, like Snoop Dogg, is a dog in name but a lion at heart, and we see this in a sequence wherein he is smuggled away in a black van that has a lion painted on the side. I was reminded of the astrological alignment of your Chiron–a minor solar body indicating where your wound is. For me, my Chiron–my wound–is in Leo, a sign associated with creativity and expression. I think Paterson and Moondog’s Chirons are probably in Leo, too. The idea of such a wound is that you must accept that your life is your art, that living it exceeds any expression you could hope to make through a medium. You may make art in your life, but at day’s end, you are the medium. And in that way, I was on Moondog’s wavelength.

Or maybe I was just high by proxy.

B+