"The Surfer" Movie Review

On the plus side, this movie received a standing ovation after it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.  Maybe the depth and meaning of this film escaped me but that’s the only plus I can provide.  The rest, not so much.

Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage playing a character with no name and known throughout the film as the Surfer or “that homeless guy”.  He takes a vacation from his big mucky-muck corporate job with a never-mentioned mucky-muck corporation.  We know he makes a lot of money because he drives a nice car, wears a nice suit, and is constantly busy on his cell phone with important conversations that seem to always cause him to shout and tussle back his mane in aggravation.

The Surfer has come back to the beach at the foot of his boyhood home on the Australian coast.  When the film opens we see the Surfer heading back to the open sea to surf with his son, known in the film only as The Kid.  Even before their feet touch the sand they are both verbally and physically accosted by the local thugs.  A group of man boys ranging in age from late teens to early retirement years.  For reasons that are never fully fleshed out they have laid claim to this plot of coastline.  The Surfer and the Kid get a verbal lashing and are told to stay off this claimed turf or face severe consequences.  The Kid is presumably the key to allow the Surfer to maintain this seemingly strained relationship and whose mother, the Surfer’s ex, is married and about to have a baby.  Reclaiming the tidal waves of his youth are second only to his primary purpose, to purchase the house at the top of the hill in which he once lived.  The bidding process and purchase of this abode is the focal point on all of his one-sided phone conversations.

Ove the next 90 minutes the Surfer allows himself to get beat up, robbed, harassed, bitten by a snake, and left for homeless in what appears to be willingly.  The movie is about him being stuck within 100 yards of the shoreline as he struggles to find food, drinkable water, and shoes which he lost along the way.  He gets to the point where he asks a shady food vendor to charge his phone for him, overnight, as he hands him the watch his father gave him as collateral.  All he had to do was drive back to his hotel or home and come back the next day.

The whole movie played out with one bad thing happening to him after another.  Each one leaving him more disheveled and farther from his goal.  There was some back story about the beach gang and how he was eventually accepted into their group but not really.  And then, in the final scene, he has some strange epiphany and the story ends in the sloppiest, untidiest, inexplicable bow.

- Paul Rosen