Surfers often describe riding waves as peaceful. Euphoric. To be
at harmony with nature. At the very least, it’s an exhilarating thrill ride.
Chasing Mavericks has
little interest in such things. Not when there are sharks, bullies, drugs, drunk
mothers, missing fathers, peer pressure, after-school jobs, betraying friends
and girlfriends. The movie is all conflict and drama; no wonder there’s so
little room for surfing.
It frames itself as a surfer-dude version of Karate Kid, where a young impressionable kid seeks out adult
guidance and training from the wacky neighbor who’s a bit eccentric about his
hobbies. Where Karate Kid understood
its themes and fluidly guided characters through them, Mavericks repeatedly loses its focus and wanders through its
boneyard of conflicts, many of which have nothing to do with surfing.
The film is based on surfer and all-around optimist Jay Moriarty,
but don’t Google his name until after you see the movie or you might spoil some
surprises. Jay was a boy when he took a spill in the ocean and was rescued by
the local surfing legend, Frosty (Gerard Butler, 300). “You just used your entire allotment of dumb luck, kid,”
Frosty tells him. Years later, as a teen, Jay (Jonny Weston) convinces Frosty to teach him how to surf big waves.
The wave Jay craves is called Mavericks, an impossible-to-surf
set of waves regarded as myth and urban legend by local surfers. If you’ve seen
Stacy Peralta’s fantastic surf documentary Riding
Giants then you’ll remember that Mavericks is a real monster that has
slayed several surfers, including some pros. The waves only break big during a
12-week window in the winter and they crash on sharp rocks that jut out from
the coast. Wipe out on Mavericks and you risk being held underwater for minutes
at a time, or getting ripped to shreds on the rocks. Oh, and 100 tons of water
is repeatedly crashing over your head. Surfing Mavericks, it seems, is
suicidal.
The movie takes places in the early ’90s when Mavericks was only
known to a handful of adventurous surfers. Jay discovers it after stowing away
on top of Frosty’s van as he drives up the coast to the then-secret location.
Once he’s discovered, Jay, already a fantastic surfer, pleads with Frosty to
train him to the ways of the big-wave surfer. Frosty’s eventual training regimen is
unorthodox. For instance, Jay must be able to paddle 36 miles across a bay and
hold his breath for four minutes. Jay practices holding his breath in school
and passes out at his de4sk to the bewilderment of his classmates. Three-page,
single-spaced typed essays about tides and coastal geology are also required. They
only start surfing together at the very end.
It’s obvious fairly early on that Chasing Mavericks is not just a surfing movie. Early scenes show
Jay caring for his mother (Elizabeth Shue, the Karate Kid girlfriend), who seems to have a drinking problem, or
maybe she just sleeps in every morning — the movie’s PG rating prevents it from
saying. His dad disappeared years before, which mirrors some of Frosty’s
problem; Frosty, meanwhile, neglects his own children, who we barely see. A
girlfriend also turns up, if only to cause tension for the emotionally fragile Jay.
Then there’s a bully who’s so comically cliché that he seems to have invaded
the film from some forgotten high school sitcom. We first meet the bully as he
bats side-view mirrors from parked cars — always the sign of a lovely adolescent. The plot finds itself sidetracked to
such a degree that we forget the waves and the beaches altogether. The daddy
issues are particularly frustrating because they frequently contradict each
other. Is Frosty Jay’s replacement father, or is Frosty turning Jay free to
care for his own kids? The movie suggests both, as well as other scenarios.
Mavericks succeeds when
it stays on topic in the ocean on the waves. I liked the way it presented surf
culture as a low-key hobby, not the overwhelming caricature of other movies,
where tie-dyed surfers call each other “bra” and they channel the beauty of the
waves amid a stoner haze. Frosty does have one questionable line that you’ll
end up forgiving: “We all come from
the sea, but we are not all of the
sea.” Say what?!
Ultimately, though, the film fails to show the exhilaration of
big-wave surfing. There’s no sense of speed, or movement, or scale. It’s the
film’s responsibility to make us feel a difference between a 5-foot swell and a
massive five-story behemoth traveling 45 mph toward sharp rocks. Chasing Mavericks is incapable of
showing that. This is especially frustrating at the end, when those big waves
should frighten us, but they just seem like one of many conflicts within the
plot.
I didn’t much care for Mavericks’
clunky delivery or its vast array of non-surfing story conflicts, but I do
recommend the movie to families this weekend. Non-animated family films are
hard to come by, and Chasing Mavericks
is bound to inspire your children and pre-teens. Just don’t get their hopes up
about the surfing, which is often secondary to everything else that’s
happening.
