Hal Kitchen
This time last year I reviewed out of the London Film Festival another psychological thriller about the violent underbelly of outback masculinity in The Royal Hotel, which I’m sorry to say seems to have flown under the radar since. Now a year on we have the Nicolas Cage vehicle The Surfer, which explores many those same ideas. The two movies are very different animals, but each in its own way is every bit as intense, funny, offbeat and gruesomely watchable as the other.
Cage plays the titular nameless surfer who has come home to the coastal Australian town where he was raised. His life isn’t going well; he’s separated from his wife, losing his connection with his son, neglecting his job in the city and now in a last ditch effort to get back the happiness he found as a boy, he’s trying to buy the beachfront house where he grew up. However, when he brings his son (Finn Little) down to show off his old haunt and catch some waves, he finds the beach prowled by a clan of macho new age thugs who violently defend their turf from outsiders.
There’s always an unspoken classism to films about city dwellers being appalled by the hostility of rural types, something this film seems well aware of. In this case, yes Cage is a rich yuppie but so are the “locals”. City boy posers who come down to “blow off some steam” and are only tolerated cause they’re rich and chummy with the gaslighting local cops. It’s only a vengeful homeless man (Nicholas Cassim) who sees them for the vile creatures they are and passes the torch of pitiful local outcast onto Cage. Desperate to restore his dignity and throwing good efforts after bad, Cage soon starts to find his old life, his hopes for the future, and his sanity melting away in the face of their smug, intractable machismo of this odious boys club.
Nicolas Cage has reached a point in his career where he’s evolved from respected leading man, to something of a laughing stock, until finally reaching a level of esteem where that sense of imbalance is gone. There’s not “the Cage who starred in Leaving Las Vegas” and “the one who starred in The Wicker Man” anymore. He was always both and he was always a great actor whose fearlessness with his roles rescued his career from the doldrums of his “anything to get me out of debt” era. The Surfer finds him in another of those roles that sure, another actor could’ve played, or tried to, but nobody could’ve inhabited it the way Cage does. He sure does put himself out there. There’s a hall of fame of iconic Nicolas Cage moments and The Surfer has two more to add to that esteemed collection. They both involve a dead rat and I laughed out loud at both. The Surfer isn’t a comedy per-se, but it is absurd and Cage’s aura of confused desperation is perfect for it.
There’s a long lineage of movies about city types losing their minds under the Australian sun and of course Wake in Fright is the classic, never bettered go-to, but there’s shades of other ’70s Ozploitation flicks like The Cars that Ate Paris and Long Weekend here too. The cinematography and sound design work wonders to pull you into Cage’s deteriorating state, with nature itself assaulting his senses. The laughing kookaburras, chirping cicadas, barking dogs and incessant heat-haze are almost migraine inducing. The entire movie unfolds on either the beach or the small car park and its adjacent public restroom, but the milieu is portrayed so evocatively that the sense of claustrophobia induced becomes very much an asset as Cage is exiled to the parched square of tarmac, gazing covetously down at the alpha male bullies cooling off among the waves below.
Exceptionally well done it may be, but we’ve seen this kind of thing before right? True, but it’s still a gripping experience, both nauseating and thrilling, and in the final third The Surfer really manages to inject some complexity into the scenario and provide some surprises. It’s here that we see some original payoff for the familiar buildup and the righteous anger that’s been building for the last ninety minutes gets released, both in the sense of unleashed and let go of. The Surfer is a fun ride but what sets it apart is that it really sticks the landing, that and another dynamite performance from the man of the hour.
