Beach Rats (2017)

People are voting emotionally.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Beach Rats does not exploit, forgive, promise or give any explanations. Inherently, the film is a character study, but also a mere observation of the profound difficulties in being human.The main character is progressively lost, lacking any harmony between his genuine identity, and the one he has built over time for the sake of survival: something we all do, as a social species. This dissonance gives way to so much pain, and not once does Hittman make it something it is not. Sometimes, suffering is just suffering and has no purpose.But we do see, from time to time, how Frankie truly is: he is not his exterior. This gives his suffering purpose. Although there is no clear resolution, which is disappointing, there is hope. I think people have forgotten that the whole point of narratives is not for the sake of the characters but for us, the audience. It's clear, here, that we will not see his fractured life become one. There is no resolution, which could easily have been achieved had there been more time. I cannot blame the lack of time on the cinematography though, as it is delicate, humane, and builds up Frankies world, his human experience. This focus on the smallest of things, is beautifully used to further this study in this particular point in Frankies life. Had there been a mere 30 more minutes, I do not doubt for a moment that the whole plot in of itself would be perfect.Beach Rats is not a perfect film at all. But it is not an exaggeration at all

I went to IMDb to see what other people had said about this film, and the very first review I saw had the title of "Boring.""Beach Rats" is quiet and thoughtful, and it demands a certain amount of patience, but it breaks my heart that someone would dismiss it as boring. It follows a lost youth navigating the no man's land between teenager and adult as he tries to figure out how to be the person he wants to be -- whoever that is -- in an environment that tells him who he should be. He hangs out with a bunch of losers who speak in a kind of dumb bro language and couldn't string together an articulate thought between the three of them while wandering aimlessly around Coney Island and its environs looking to score easy drugs. Meanwhile, he carries on a secret life of gay encounters with older men while at the same time trying to force himself to enjoy a relationship with a young woman who's too mature for him.Is he gay? Probably. Does he specifically seek out older men as father figures because his own dad just recently died of lingering cancer? Maybe. But the point is that he doesn't have the tools required to process any of the things he's feeling because he lives in a stunted place surrounded by stunted people, and it's easier to escape into feeling good the bad way than to put work into feeling better the hard way.More than anything "Beach Rats" is about how hard it is for men to explore their own feelings in a culture that has rigidly defined what it means to be masculine. Grade: A

It's a tough movie, a young guy struggling with his sexuality, but what a beautiful young guy, and an amazing performance. I hope he goes on to great things.

Eliza Hittman's second feature film gives us a beautiful and poetic slice of life in the mundanity of the outer edges of Brooklyn as well as Coney Island where we find the struggling closeted (maybe) 20-something year old Frankie (Harris Dickinson). While this minimal plot could have easily become boring, I found the way in which this plot was told was exciting and extremely profound. Similar to Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk about Kevin, this story is told in between the words. And perhaps Hittman wrote the dialogue in a bland manner, almost as if you were talking to a person for the first time except to everyone in your life (but make no mistake, sometimes it comes out quite intricately even in its bluntness) in order to draw our attention more towards the visuals which is where this movie most strongly focuses. She gives us a shot of an action and then a shot of the fallout and the reactions. There are several close-ups on Dickinson where he might be covering his face from embarrassment or listless or concerned, and it becomes quite obvious that any lesser actor could have easily floundered this role. Dickinson gave a master class performance here. Hittman makes it easy for us to smell the salty sea air, or taste a marijuana cigarette on our lips, or physically feel Frankie's sexual partner, and these sensory details are really what makes this movie a delight and why I would describe it as poetic. Just like Kevin, we get snippets and the audience must sew together the story themselves. To toss out a few more references, this movie explored similarly the gay identity and the conforming nature of society in the manner of Moonlight from last year. Frankie finds himself in a liminal period here he internally struggles whether he should live a normal heterosexual life with his "girlfriend," Simone (Madeline Weinstein), and his three other distanced jock friends who like to smoke weed, party, and play handball (these three characters were a little underwritten), or he should continue in his clandestine hook-ups with random older gay men on a chat website. He finds himself living a double life where he can either live how society and his peers want him to or he can follow his true feelings even though it might get him shunned, and I found this characterized in several reflecting mirror shots. This confusion gives his character a strong sense of ennui towards his entire existence and it seems like he's just trying to kill time until the next time he can get high and escape that mindset for a while. (The drug scenes here also reminded me strongly of the drug scenes in Spring Breakers (2012) and they seem to represent the same ephemerality of the high and then the bland comedown with similar color palettes as well). Overall, I could see how someone might find this film boring, or run of the mill, and I might slightly agree with the questionable actions of the characters at the end, but I truly think that an attentive viewer will find a uniquely and beautifully told story.