The Beach Bum (2019)

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Martin Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Jimmy Buffet, and Bertie Higgins, with a cameo by Carmella
Grade: A

Matthew McConaughey was born to play this role.

Summary

In Key West, Florida, there lives a homeless wanderer and former prolific poet known affectionately to everyone as Moondog (McConaughey). As we see him piss away his talents as a writer by drinking, doing drugs, partying, and fucking everything in sight, he gets a phone call from his rich wife Minnie (Fisher). She’s in Miami cheating on Moondog with R&B singer Lingerie (Dogg), though they’re both cheating so it doesn’t matter. She calls to say she wants him over because she’s planning their twenty-year-old daughter Heather’s (Stefania LaVie Owen) wedding. Moondog is hesitant about coming back to Miami to see all the fake people and goes on another bender, passing out on the floor of the boat he’s staying at. After the old woman who owns the boat patches up his head wound the next morning, Moondog decides to trek back home, taking a small motorboat back to Minnie.

After they hang out and he eats her out in front of the housekeepers, Moondog tells her he’s meeting with his agent Lewis (Hill) today over the book he’s been writing. It’s not done yet, but it’s going to be a good one. Minnie tells him not to be late for the wedding though. It’ll be at Lingerie’s place. He even got ordained just for the event. Moondog meets with Lewis for a golf outing where they discuss Moondog’s potential being wasted on booze and drugs, but Moondog thinks it’s the fuel that helps him write. He’s also not worried because he’s rich. In actuality, it’s Minnie that’s rich. The discussion doesn’t really go anywhere, and Lewis mentions he’s not mad he didn’t get invited to the wedding. However, as Moondog points out, it’s probably because Lewis walked in on Heather changing years ago. Afterwards, Moondog picks up a random woman from a restaurant and fucks her in the kitchen, making him late for the wedding. After a phone call from Minnie, he gets there as the ceremony is happening, wheels some old woman off the stage and into a column, and makes an awkward speech right after where he grabs the groom’s package (“That’s not bad, like five inches flaccid”). Once he hands the mic back to Lingerie to finish his officiating, Lingerie tells the groom he married into a fucked-up family.

Minnie hangs with Heather at the reception, and she admits to banging Lingerie, but they both laugh it off, saying Moondog wouldn’t care. Plus, Lingerie is around more anyway.

Meanwhile, Moondog and Lingerie party and get high together. Lingerie then shows Moondog a special weed tree specifically grown out of an isolated pond in Jamaica, sprouting out of a pink, fluorescent moss patch. Once a year, Lingerie flies over to do a show and then bribes the government for them to look away when he steals another. We cut back and forth into a scene where Moondog makes another speech at the reception and him getting high with Lingerie at a pier and spouting out some more poetry. Lingerie stars to weep, saying it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard, but Moondog admits D.H. Lawrence wrote it. He plagiarized it for a seventh-grade poetry contest he won. Later during the reception, Moondog spots Lingerie and Minnie kissing, and he’s shocked. He gets even more high and walks into the pool nearby, still holding his joint above the water when he goes under. Heather sees Moondog in the water, so he comes out and dances with her. That night, he goes out to a bar and annoys some people talking about the Lingerie/Minnie situation. Just then, Minnie shows up at the bar and all is well. They hang out, drink, and dance with each other under the moonlight outside. Sadly, the two intoxicated lovers go for a drive, and Minnie accidentally crashes the car. Moondog escapes with minor injuries, but Minnie is badly injured. At the hospital, Moondog talks with her when she wakes up for a moment. As they laugh one more time together, Minnie passes away.

At the funeral, he sadly smokes a joint with Heather. After some somber drinking and a viewing of an old video of Moondog in his prime speaking to a small live audience, he works a bit more on his book. He meets with Minnie’s lawyer, and he tells Moondog that he has to publish his novel, or he will get none of the money in Minnie’s will. She was afraid Moondog would piss away her family’s fortune and had a feeling she would die before him, so she had a will made for a while. Until he gets his book published, half of everything goes to Heather and the other half owed to Moondog sits frozen in escrow. Once Moondog picks up some clothes and his typewriter, these rules will be effective immediately. Since everything was in Minnie’s name, he’s kicked out of the house. He’s got no other clothes, cars, or anything else. The money will be under Heather’s control. It’s now all up to him to buckle down and finish his book.

Moondog will now react in the only way he knows how: irrationally.

My Thoughts:

Despite being such an unconventional, weird comedy with a narrative so loose you could drive a car through it, The Beach Bum is wildly entertaining. Put together by one of Hollywood’s most eccentric real-life personalities in writer/director Harmony Korine, we get a free-flowing, breezy, and totally erratic experience filled with random happenings and colorful characters that inhabit the wild area of south Florida. Honestly, I can’t guarantee you’ll like the film because of how unusual it is, but I couldn’t look away. I was completely hooked by the uniqueness of The Beach Bum.

Almost all of the credit for this goes to Matthew McConaughey. In one of his most fascinating performances in a career full of them, McConaughey goes all out for his role as poet-turned-drifter in Moondog. If he didn’t completely immerse himself into the role and become the larger-than-life Moondog, all of the film’s flaws would’ve made the final product look like Swiss cheese. Thankfully, he’s so deep into the character and his undisciplined nomadic lifestyle that he makes The Beach Bum into something that has to be seen to be believed, purely because of the performance aspect of it all. The character of Moondog has to be one of the wildest protagonists of the last twenty-five years of mainstream filmmaking. I’m serious. With a fun-loving laugh, bleached blond hair, and flip-up sunglasses, Moondog wanders the Florida Keys living life to the fullest. He drinks to excess, does drugs to excess, and fucks any woman he wants. He lives to have a good time. He has no plan. Moondog’s goal is to have fun and enjoy life.

It’s what keeps his mind “moist” or “lubricated” (as he puts it).

If it guarantees a good time, Moondog is going to do it without questions. If there are consequences, he’ll deal with them later. Did he need to break into his own house with a bunch of homeless people and destroy the place, knowing he could go to jail or rehab? He didn’t think of it beforehand. He just went for it and went about things the way he thought he should in that moment of time, figuring things will work themselves out. The thought of something bad happening never crosses his mind in the pursuit of living life while he’s alive. He does what he wants in the moment, as soon as he thinks it. We see this firsthand when he has one conversation with Flicker about breaking out of rehab. As soon as Flicker makes his point, Moondog agrees and immediately tosses a chair to break the window, forcing the idea into effect on the spot. This positive, instinctive, and somewhat nihilistic approach towards life carries Moondog on daily adventures of “Let’s see what happens”.

In high school, have you ever gone into a test you didn’t study for but went in and decided to “wing it”? Well, imagine you’re an adult and you’re set up for life financially. You don’t have a care in the world. From here on out, you just decide to “wing” life and see where it takes you. This is essentially The Beach Bum and the story of the “Florida man” icon that is Moondog.

Moondog’s irresponsibility makes this oddball film, with an offbeat energy and tone that you never quite figure out even when the credits roll, into such a different cinematic experience. It’s the type of movie where you start to feel high while watching it, so you start laughing at nonsensical things just like Moondog does. The constant state of intoxication seems to boil over to the audience, and we just start enjoying the ride into the abyss of his life, waving to all the crazy characters he befriends along the way. It’s escapist fun for the non-stoner and the stoner. You just sit back, relax, and watch this man enjoy life and all of its extracurricular activities. This is a guy who wanders to meet Captain Wack and after helping him with a boat tour to make some money, Wack gets attacked by a shark and gets his foot bitten off. As he’s being taken away in an ambulance, Moondog calmly says he’s leaving and jokingly trades Wack’s foot for his captain’s hat. Wack doesn’t even get mad. He just laughs it off as if to say, “That’s classic Moondog”. The wild man then goes on to his next adventure without a care in the world. It’s random shit like this that happens consistently and Moondog, staying intoxicated the whole way, just smiles and lets things happen as they do like riding in an airplane with Lingerie’s pilot who is 98% blind. Despite this man being absolutely insane, Moondog calmly rides with him as they smoke together while hoping for the best. He’s just along for the ride and honestly, so are we because we never know what to expect.

Even Minnie passes off his reckless behavior to Heather, saying “You just have to accept he’s from another dimension”. Moondog is this enigma that has to live life the way he sees fit. He can’t be changed. He has to stay true to himself, no matter what happens. Within this world The Beach Bum presents to us, everyone in his life and around him seems to understand this, and it’s so interesting to watch unfold. At first, I was mad at the ending of this film, but when I saw him float away on his little boat as the credits rolled in, I started to think. Then, I legitimately sat down and smiled as I said to myself, “Well, that’s classic Moondog”.

I get it now. This is the type of effect this movie has on you if you’re fully locked into the experience and just shut off for an hour and a half.

What I really found interesting were the small glimpses into the sober version of Moondog. We see how he reacts when he sees Minnie cheating on him. In reality, he doesn’t really know how to react because he very rarely sees these types of personal struggles anymore. He hits his joint, steps into a pool mid-wedding, and continues to smoke. The only way he can deal with any of his problems is when he’s out of it. Later in the film, we see video footage of a younger Moondog before the alcohol and drugs took over. It’s almost heartbreaking because you see how passionate he was when he was younger and how he was a completely different man ready to take on the world. When Moondog watches the video himself, he smiles saying, “I was good”. It’s not a loss of confidence in himself either, he just looks back on this as another time when he was happy. We never get the sense that he wants to go back and relive those days, or that he’s saddened from how he used to look and act. He’s happy with who he’s become. We never get an answer as to why he turned into the person he is now and whether it was one specific moment that turned him over the edge, or it was always a problem that just spiraled out of control. It makes you wonder how this normal, intelligent dude completely fell apart and into this careless state of mind that can only be happy while doing something to “feed the juices in my noggin, through my loins to the Autobahn, in spirit and mind”.

If I were to venture a guess on how Moondog became who he is, it seems like his fame and meeting the fake people that tried to attach themselves to him ruined his outlook on humanity, forcing him to lose hope on everyone and everything. This resulted in a breakdown of sorts. It had to of. He gives off too much homeless man energy, despite his fun personality.

It’s either that or he was inspired by Pauly Shore’s “Weasel” persona. This I would totally understand.

Right in the opening, Minnie asks Moondog to come back to Miami, and he balks at the suggestion disapprovingly saying, “Eh. Civilization?”. He then says he’s a bottom feeder and how he does much better when he’s amongst the free people of the Keys and how it helps him. It seems to him that the underbelly of Florida and dealing with what he considers “real” people is what keeps him going in life. The fake personalities he’s met in places like Miami may have been the reason why he started to deteriorate all along and what led to his addictions. It’s hard to tell, but when you see these flashbacks and you see the passion in Moondog’s eyes when he speaks to the smaller crowds, you can see something changed along the way when he got big that messed with his head. The best part is when after Moondog finally does write his book and is asked how he comes up with ideas in the midst of his debauchery, he starts to speak in his usual manner but as he gets into it, his eyes start to light up and the vigor and passion start to pour out into his words. It shows us how his genius and internal fire that keeps him going, though buried deep under alcohol, weed, and everything else, is still there and comes out of his pores when the time is right and when he’s very fucked up. It’s such a thought-provoking scene that centers the character in a fascinating way, proving there is a method to his next-level madness.

The character is so exotic and though The Beach Bum doesn’t answer all of the questions we have about Moondog, I still enjoyed the “Moondog experience” that was this 95-minute trip.

On top of the Oscar-worthy performance of the effortlessly charismatic Matthew McConaughey, you get an all-star ensemble cast that really makes for an unorthodox but highly entertaining adventure.

Isla Fisher is great, Snoop Dogg was cast well, and Martin Lawrence was completely unpredictable as Captain Wack, a former Vietnam veteran who heads up boat tours to see dolphins and is technically responsible for four deaths, though he keeps on getting his license back on technicalities. From his odd love of dolphins and owning a coke-addicted parrot, Wack was one of the most interesting supporting characters I’ve seen in a long time. He had almost no influence on the outcome of Moondog’s story (other than gifting him his hat), but this detour is a big part of the bizarre happenings Moondog finds himself in daily. Martin Lawrence and McConaughey’s chemistry was a nice surprise too. I never would’ve thought those two would be as random and funny as they were together.

I miss Martin Lawrence. Where has he been lately?

Jonah Hill’s New Orleans accent was ridiculously fake, but he was so funny, this movie’s weirdness wouldn’t have been the same without him. He completed the ensemble and raised the humor to another degree. His ramblings about Moondog and their back-and-forth conversations together were almost completely unintelligible, but I was so entertained with the two I didn’t care whatsoever. In fact, I wished there was more of it. I couldn’t help but laugh maniacally over the strangeness of both men. He plays the type of character you want to quote constantly, accent and all, just because it was so amusing. If I was ever an actor practicing monologues, I would be choosing something from Jonah Hill’s Lewis character to imitate because it would be ridiculously fun to learn. Zac Efron was very underutilized though. Accompanied by a look inspired by eating a panini sandwich (according to Harmony Kormine himself), Efron’s Flicker is a very interesting young man who is a paint-huffing pyromaniac who dresses like it’s the year 2000. Flicker and Moondog meet in rehab and though it’s a decent chunk of the story, his screen time didn’t nearly equate to the way he was marketed when the movie came out. I really expected/wanted Flicker to circle back and join Moondog for a little bit more towards the end of the movie, but we only got a taste at the havoc they caused for their small number of scenes together. It was very funny though.

Admittedly, the full story of The Beach Bum is just as careless as Moondog. Though we technically have a plot, the story wanders. It’s not for everyone. Honestly, it felt like they forgot the plot halfway through, followed McConaughey around with a camera and filmed it, hoping for magic to happen. Because of McConaughey’s talents, they pulled it off for the most part. Though the movie would’ve been perfected had some of the supporting characters had more goals or reasons to exist and more screen time was added to make this a more well-rounded story in terms of depth, there’s still something so wildly entertaining about this movie. You can’t really explain it because Kormine goes about it in all the wrong ways, but it still works.

There’s just something so serene about a laughing Moondog riding a boat while drunk.

The unfocused story of The Beach Bum is somehow worth the watch. You have to see this bizarre creature in action as he continues on his never-ending quest to forever stay intoxicated and to forever have fun.

I would’ve loved to read this crazy bastard’s memoir.

If you remember one thing coming out of this movie, “Don’t ever bet against the Moondog”.

Fun Fact: The role of Moondog was apparently written for Gary Oldman, but he turned it down.

Thank God.