A sunny beach noir sounds like a contradiction until you’re sweating in the sand aware of the sting in your eyes and the uncomfortable sense that there’s something wrong with you, your life and how you’re living it. Why aren’t you having more fun?
“The Surfer,” directed by Lorcan Finnegan (“Vivarium”) and written by Thomas Martin, captures that scenic unease and cranks up the heat until even its own bright yellow retro title font looks sarcastic. It’s a film in which the mythic crashes into the ridiculous, the intersection where its star Nicolas Cage has also staked his career. Playing an unnamed surfer stuck high and dry atop a parched parking lot, Cage stares down at the waves below with the thirst of a battered cartoon coyote. You half-expect to see his pupils pop out of his binocular lenses.
The action all takes place on a small spot of coastland in fictitious Luna Bay, Australia, where Cage’s character claims he grew up before moving to California at age 15. His accent doesn’t have a trace of it, but at least his skin is tanned the same shade of orange as his hair. Now a linen-suit-clad businessman, he’s returned with his own teenage son (Finn Little) shortly before Christmas with some paternal ocean wisdom. “You either surf it or you get wiped out,” Cage tells his boy, philosophically.
The kid is unimpressed by him; the local surf bullies even less so. Cage doesn’t get a toe in the tide before he’s given the heave-ho by a pretentious group of quasi-spiritual surfers called the Bay Boys. The beach is public, Cage insists. The Bay Boys’ guru Scalley (Julian McMahon, fantastic) is unmoved. “Yeah, but nah,” Scalley says and shrugs, his chill turning ice cold. An intimidatingly fit and happy life coach, Scalley promotes the power of male primal energy, although the film is savvy enough to point out that he was also born rich and curates an Instagram. Kudos to costumer Lien See Leong for outfitting McMahon in a hooded terry cloth poncho that makes him look like Jesus walked across the water to hang ten.
“The Surfer” has a plot you could recount in 30 seconds. First, Cage won’t leave and then he can’t leave — and then he can’t do anything without the Bay Boys making him suffer. (“Suffer” and “surfer,” Martin’s script points out, are only one letter apart.) The film is inspired by a real-life surf gang from the Palos Verdes Peninsula, but everything from the pace to the performances has been amplified into absurdity. A minute never goes by without Cage’s circumstances getting worse. His insistence on staying put makes him sacrifice one status object after another — his phone, his shoes, his car — and it isn’t long until he’s limping and ranting and crouching next to condom wrappers while men chase him with tiki torches. Luna Bay drives people lunatic. It’s all building toward the same tsunami of rage.
Cage has been on a streak of making catchy low-budget B-movies by rising filmmakers such as “Pig,” “Dream Scenario” and “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.” It’s a brilliant approach: His fame gets interesting projects off the ground and, in turn, he gets to be the biggest thing in them. Not every film works, but enough of them do, particularly the ones that promise violence — which this delivers, but not in the way you might think. Most of “The Surfer’s” damage is mental; we’re steeped in Cage’s descent. It would make a great double-feature with Burt Lancaster’s 1968 “The Swimmer,” another hallucinatory psychodrama about a braggart skidding downhill.
The tribalistic Bay Boys deserve sea urchin spikes jammed into their toes. You come to hate their enviable ease, the pink zinc cream slashed across their noses, their wagging tongues and middle fingers. (They even sabotage the water fountain, just like Rome’s Gen. Aquillius is said to have poisoned his enemy’s wells.) Their giant, phony smiles reminded me of dolphins circling their prey and their mean laughter is blended into the sound of cackling birds. I think the film knows that the gang name Bay Boys — the same one as the actual Californians — is a lame idea of cool. It’s hard for the characters to say it with menace. More unnerving is the way everyone just accepts these guys are in charge. Shrugs one ritzy woman, “It stops them beating the Botox out of their wives.”
At stake is our outrage that the beauty in this world has been commandeered by people who act like they own the planet. We wouldn’t be as invested if the stakes were privately owned — say, a golf club or a gated community — although Cage’s character with his luxury car and costly latte habit probably cares about those, too. He’s no honorable underdog, brushing off a bum (Nicholas Cassim) who begs him for help. Cage doesn’t want to equal the playing field. He either wants to belong or burn it all down.
For him, this beach is personal. As a boy, he played on this exact spot. As a man (and there’s more testosterone in this movie than water in the Pacific Ocean) he’s desperate to buy back his grandfather’s house on the cliff. These blue-green waves are his birthright. In phantasmagoric flashbacks, we learn that his family spilled blood in their foam. Now, that promise is receding by the hour as guys with happier families and healthier muscles take his place. The grief in this film is relatable to anyone who’s realized how hard it is to go home again, whether that means a newly gentrified neighborhood or simply the security of what a middle-class wage used to afford.
Sun and sea are in every frame. Golden light dapples on Cage’s face. Aerial shots of water are used as scene wipes and their crashing noise underscores his psychic distress. Radek Ladczuk’s psychedelic camerawork loves dramatic zooms and lenses that make bodies blend and distort, underscoring how easily someone can slide from comfortable to wretched, and the grandly mystical soundtrack by François Tétaz is wonderful, even if it uses enough wind chimes to summon Poseidon.
“It’s all building to this breaking point,” Cage says of the waves. Audiences hoping for a gonzo bloodbath will be disappointed that Finnegan keeps his morality murky. But it’s the right choice. It bugs you just like “The Surfer” intends to, making the film follow you home like sand in your shoes.
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