According to Hollywood, a surfer can be one of three things: a weed-smoking, wave-chasing airhead (Jeff Spicoli); a crunchy, woo-woo hippie (some of the penguins in the startlingly charming Surf’s Up); or an edgy, degenerate type, whose passion for adrenaline is paired with a generally violent demeanor (Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi in Point Break). The truth, as ever, is somewhere in between—you can expect even the gentlest of “soul-surfers” to hiss and fight over their home break.
What, then, can we make of the unnamed protagonist (played by Nicolas Cage) in Lorcan Finnegan’s latest feature, The Surfer, beaten and humiliated in his quest to surf the Edenic waves of Luna Bay, the Australian beach where he grew up? Having been born there doesn’t grant him status as a local: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” goes the tagline spat at him by the local crew. In the days leading up to Christmas, the surfer drives to the Bay to show his son the house where he grew up, which he is on the verge of buying back, if only he can outbid a competitive buyer. The surfer has long neglected his family, and a return to the wholesomeness of the beach—the beautiful surfing, the house perched on the cliff, the memory of an idyllic childhood—might help rebuild the relationships that have been sacrificed at the altar of his career.
Over the grueling 100 minutes that ensue, the surfer goes through a series of increasingly elaborate traps, pranks, and mindfucks orchestrated by the locals which will cause him to get bitten by a rat, walk on shards of glass, drink impotable water, contemplate murder, lose his watch, phone, and car, and pretty much go insane. “Localism is part of the culture,” an unhelpful cop tells the surfer. “It keeps undesirables out of the neighborhood.”
Localism is what surfers call the rule of etiquette that dictates the way a visitor should carry themselves in foreign waters: respectfully, almost bashfully. It’s a mindset I know well. I grew up spending weekends on a quiet beach 70 miles outside São Paulo, where my dad is one of the long-established locals. Once, walking to the beach, we crossed paths with a young man whom, my dad told me with some amusement, he’d recently kicked out of the water. I was shocked. My dad eats flax seeds. He’s almost disturbingly contemplative. He has habits like walking barefoot on grass first thing in the morning, to “ground” himself. He never raises his voice, though his I’m disappointed look is earth-shattering. I shuddered to think of it in the water, as he unleashed it on this kid, like he didn’t want to do this but had been left with no choice.
Like most surfers, my dad hasn’t always worked the door, as it were; he’s also been confronted, most memorably by a fuming Hawaiian local who refused to shake his hand. Along with screenwriter Thomas Martin, Finnegan stretches the stereotype of the aggressive surfer into caricature. Led by one Scott “Scally” Callahan, played gamely by Julian McMahon, the Bay Boys, as they are called, form a locals-only cult, or militia, tasked with guarding the break against intruders. The idea is that this task, along with other rituals that involve branding and taking hallucinogens, will provide the men with an outlet through which to “let out a little steam.” Scally, who is like the lunatic lovechild of Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, believes that modern men need a way to get in touch with the animalistic impulses that have been stifled by the tyranny of emasculation. Disciples alternate between two selves: responsible, dutiful family men and violent, base freaks. The transition between selves is painful, and for Scally, that’s the point: “You must suffer to surf,” he admonishes, repeatedly.
Finnegan had his work cut out for him when he cast, in the starring role, Nicolas Cage, America’s doyen of humiliation. Over the last couple of decades, Cage’s confused legacy—are we laughing at him or with him?—has provided younger directors with a perfect marionette of an actor, a doll to be sadistically battered and swung around. The draw of films like 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent or, to some extent, 2023’s Dream Scenario, is not necessarily Nic Cage the actor, but Nic Cage the meme.
At one point, when the surfer is on the near edge of losing his mind, the locals and members of the larger Luna Bay community literally point and laugh at him, inviting the audience to join in. The surfer isn’t a character, or even a man; he is a vehicle for Nicolas Cage to be reduced to desperate pantomime. That’s the film’s main gimmick. The other is that, over the course of four nights, the surfer never leaves the beach parking lot, though for the majority of that time he has at his disposal a perfectly functioning Lexus with a full tank of gas and working air conditioning.
The Surfer’s best insight is that localism, whatever it might mean to any particular surfer or community, can be a tool with which to wield power. The beach is public—that’s the first argument the surfer tries on the locals—but by relying on the unwritten rules of the sport, the Bay Boys can demarcate their region and govern it, however psychotically. Their members are already powerful in modern society’s most legible ways: They are white, rich, and conventionally attractive. They are the kind of guys so used to getting what they want that they feel entitled to the ocean. To dig into that psyche and expose the connections between a retrograde vision of masculinity and a sense of entitlement to land, to the water, and to nature, would be a fresh way to present the issue of localism, even more by rooting the story in a country with a fraught history of colonization.
But by locking Cage in the parking lot, The Surfer extricates localism from identification with the landscape. Besides establishing in a cartoonish way that we’re in Australia (a humongous country), the specifics of Luna Bay are never explored. It could be a beach anywhere. It exists in a vacuum divorced from the context that would clarify why the Bay Boys are so determined to guard it—or, for that matter, why the surfer longs to return. It’s not entirely hard to understand, for example, why a Hawaiian local might take issue with my dad or any foreigner whose surfing trip is inextricable from a long history of colonization and exploitation. In Catherine Hardwicke’s 2005 film Lords of Dogtown, the boys who guard the abandoned, rotting Pacific Park Pier in Venice Beach are so destitute that control over the break is the only sliver of power, however illusory, that they have.
I know: It’s not that deep! It’s supposed to be a farce! That much is clear; the film is obviously more committed to punishing Nicolas Cage for the viewer’s pleasure than to engaging meaningfully with any of the interesting ideas at which it gestures. In title if not in theme, The Surfer seems to be distantly referencing Frank and Eleanor Perry’s 1968 adaptation of John Cheever’s story The Swimmer, a sincere movie if there ever was one. The protagonist of that movie, Ned Merrill, is humiliated because the life he had, which he failed to nurture, is lost to him, and everyone knows. The surfer is humiliated because lacking other options, he considers biting into a dead rat. The water fountain from which he hopes to get water is soiled with dog shit. He cries wah wah wah. In the thick of being gaslighted by the locals, he reminds himself: “I have a car. I have a job. I have a name. I have a son.” It’s all the film can do to convince us that here we have a character, but we never even learn his name.
