| John Stockwell's Quest for
the Perfect Wave
One
of Gene Siskel's favorite movies was Saturday Night Fever, which he said
approximated the feel of working class kids with extraordinary gifts, cursed because their
gifts aren't immediately lucractive. The audience could certainly feel Tony Manero's
rebellion against his family because most of us have felt the pressure of facing a
bottomless future of jobs with no escape. The pressure squeezes the talented the hardest;
those who dominate the local scenes are always haunted by the notion that they are just
that and nothing more. When Tony Manero hit the dance floor, all of that anger poured into
his disco, the commingling of talent and desire exploding into a dizzying disco ball
illuminated by neon fantasy and fueled by the pulsing rythms of the Bee Gees. We see his
intensity feed his genius and his trapped adolescence, the shallow musical orgasm of disco
the perfect chorus for his reckless sexual escapades, the audience yearning for Tony to
finally channel his sexual energy and youthful confusion into something artistic enough
for him to escape the working class drone most of us face everyday. Like Jude Law says in Road
to Perdition, "Isn't that the dream? To do what we love?"
Roger Ebert talks about Saturday Night Fever in his
three-star review of Blue Crush, probably in his continuing
homage to Siskel, whom he cites in nearly one of every four
reviews. I think I understand Siskel's devotion to Saturday
Night Fever now more than ever. Nothing squeezes the soul
quite like the pressure of your friends, family, and colleagues
telling you daily that you're "going to be famous"
and "are the absolute best" when you're a bottom
feeder in a vocation with limited jobs to be handed out. One
becomes addicted to the high of dominating the local disco,
coming down is the dark fear that when the rush is over, you'll
have to return to that which the high was an escape—the
most apparent options learning to deal with mediocrity or
drinking yourself through to old age. That's why I love these
little sub-genre, coming-of-age films—most of them are
mediocre, but I sense they're made by directors who realized
the dream of doing what they love, a short time ago facing
the same fear their lead characters do. Filmmaking subsititues
for Tony Manero's Saturday Night Fever, Arthur Agee
and William Gates' Hoop Dreams, Lane Frost's Eight
Seconds on a bucking bronc, or John Milius's Big Wednesday
quest for the perfect wave. Even if the film is average, the
spirit is real, and I respect that.
It's this spirit that probably prompted Ebert to grant Blue
Crush three stars, though the movie itself doesn't deserve
them. But I'm compelled to like this movie, which is buoyed
by the spirit of a filmmaker, John Stockwell, who only last
year nearly submarined his own career by fighting the mighty
Disney for his own vision of crazy/beautfiul, a movie
in which Kirsten Dunst gives a very brave performance as a
drugged-up congressman's daughter in love with an upstanding
Hispanic classmate. The released version is pretty average,
hurt by some gaping holes in the narrative wrought by executives
at Disney who apparently thought it best not to show Kirsten
Dunst doing drugs and having loose sex. There's a lot of good
stuff in the film (Bruce Davison, a Democratic congressman
from California, whose office is adorned only by pictures
of him with famous minorities; Kirsten Dunst marching around
her glass house, desperate for someone to notice that she's
having sex with an Hispanic, even though he's a Good Boy.),
and I'll bet that it wouldn't have been so widely dismissed
had Stockwell's version was allowed to stand.
Here with Blue Crush, Stockwell makes an average movie that, at least, shows a
lot of potential for him as filmmaker. He's very interested in the logistical problems of
love across class lines and how racism in youth is both exacerbated and dissolved by class
distinctions, ideas he associates with structures of glass and good girls gone wrong at
high school parties. This movie is inspired by Susan Orleans' article in Outdoor
Magazine "Surf Girls of Maui," the sort of investigative journalism that
punctures movie fantasies by showing us the grit and near-poverty of aspiring professional
surfers, deflating the beach blanket bingo idea of "Baywatch" bodies. In
Stockwell's fictitious account, he shows us a trio of girls as hotel maids, stepping in
the puke of a raucous Pro Bowl party thrown by offensive linemen, eating left-overs off
room service trays, and disposing of used condoms. He also catches the angry rebukes of
those with no reason to have pride in their jobs: The girls gleefully try on the
swimsuits of priveleged women.
The most talented surfer of the trio, Anne-Marie (Kate Bosworth),
after catching a few morning waves, rushes across town to
take her sister to school and at night, like in crazy/beautiful,
rescues the reckless from teenage parties. The crush of the
wage-slave life is nearly unbearable, making Anne-Marie vulnerable
to a Prince Charming under center, Pro Bowl quarterback Matt,
who may or may not possess her glass slipper. Stockwell enjoys
inverting cliched movie characters, but as good as some of
this is, Stockwell's major folly as a filmmaker is that he
can't resist cliches in romantic arcs (Matt's offer of money
to buy Anne-Marie's surfing lessons feels too much like Pretty
Woman for my taste). His ideas on class seem more
like side plots than essential to the characters' relationships.
Still, in both his movies Stockwell is on to something about
the good, somewhat old-fashioned, affection for young people
who fall in inexplicable love. Cynical moviegoers may regard
the love interests of Tony Manero, Lane Frost, and Anne-Marie
as necessary Hollywood convention, but for those threatened
by poverty, companionship can be a desperate need. If there's
a more fearsome threat than poverity, it's loneliness—as
Barbara Ehrenheich explains in Nickle and Dimed, many
of her wage-slave coworkers readily enter into relationships
for little more than sex and rent, the lightened burden of
bills mistaken for love. In short: At the bottom, sometimes
you need love, in the least, just to get by. And for
the priveleged-yet-sensitive, there's a savior-complex in
the guilt of having it so easy and watching someone you admire
waste away. Sometimes these desperate contracts are negotiated
well by the movies, but in Blue Crush, the script and
characters are far too thin. Anne-Marie's vacation romance
conflict is too patly resolved: Matt recieves a phone call
that sounds made by a wife or girlfriend, but the sideplot
is dropped without resolution other than the goo-goo eyes
made while date-surfing. With this plot point dropped, the
connection between Anne-Marie's conflict of fling/relationship
and wannabe/professional surfer isn't developed, and the whole
metaphor more or less drowns. Stockwell gives the scenes of
Matt and Anne-Marie an awkward, yet true, immediacy by filmming
them on hand-held, but what they say resembles the philosophy
of Freddie Prinze ("If you want to feel the rush, you
have to take the risk.") He has the tools as a director,
and if he can develop his authorial instincts, I'm convinced
that John Stockwell will make a great movie about self-loathing
youth.
That said, Stockwell so impressively films the Hawaiian Pipeline
that Anne-Marie's plight still registers artistically. The
opening surfing montage is so close to sunrise we can barely
make out the bikinis, but the afternoon waves are so crowded
it resembles a singles bar on surf. Stockwell's ocean is so
clear that there must be some sort of truth lurking
out there. He films the Pacific waves as if checking off a
list of prepositions: above, behind, in front of, inside,
underneath...my favorite angle is from just behind the curl
of the wave, looking at the surfer as if through a waterfall.
Blue Crush is a beautiful movie, and for those moved
more by visuals than words (like Roger Ebert), it's effect
may be more than what the script deserves—we certainly
don't wish for Anne-Marie's to be soul-crushed by a bleak
future, so it's difficult not to empathesize with her when
the camera gives us a surfboard's view of a twenty-foot wave.
Unfortunately, to make a great surfing movie, the waves need
to mean a little bit more. Blue Crush reminds me of
Big Wednseday, written and directed by John Milius,
most know for penning Apocalypse Now!. His surfing
movie is about the impending title wave of Vietnam, their
quest for great waves interrupted by draft notices. Milius
has an almost poetic obsession with the ocean and Vietnam,
one suspects that Big Wednesday might be a spin-off
from Kilgore's expedition in the gulf—it's an average
film bolstered by the punctuating image of three friends at
the end of adolescence and Vietnam, choosing to ride the inenvitable
wave and put it all behind them. The king of surfing movies
is Bob Brown's The Endless Summer, in which two friends
chase summer around the globe as if they're reaching for heaven,
searching for the nirvana of the perfect wave. Their journey
is spiritual: Mike and Robert ride a forever curling wave
in Cape St. Francis, South Africa, later tackling the twenty
foot waves of the Hawaiin pipeline, we feel the dual nature
of a peaceful and wrathful God. Stockwell's film is as awkward
as Big Wednesday, but not as ambitious, and it certainly
doesn't approach The Endless Summer's perfection, but
I'm still convinced he'll catch a better wave and make a great
movie.
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