
In the film “The Surfer,” Nicolas Cage is the titular character. Cage surfs for the first time in the last minute of the picture. Although the film takes place at a beach in Australia, it is not about surfing territory. It speaks about the anxieties of males, the power of males, the mid-age crisis of males, the beliefs of males which are about pain and conquest, and how much drama Nikolai Cage is able to extract from all of this. The Surfer had its world premiere last night at Cannes in a midnight screening which is a very good choice because this is a midnight movie the type of repetitively humorous visual rethink that one watches by just going with it.
Cage is the actor for whom that is almost effortless.
Nicolas Cage’s batshit high-concept narcissism gets all the credit. “Bad Trip” does allow himself to be a high-concept meme that gets blown up by Nicolas Cage. What people may find grating: lack of satire, obscene levels of self-indulgence, and completely unconcerned with narrative continuity permeate the movie this time through. If there’s a central question to the film “The Surfer,” which makes me wonder, it is what the reality is. What is even funnier is that there is some kind of constructive criticism. The film is illustrative and light-hearted.
This is one of those twisty-headed puzzle movies in which one can be sure that the man who will be credited with the role of the title character is The Surfer. Even so, for a time, Cage appears to be selling the character as simply a hopelessly exasperated middle-aged finance man in a grey raccoon skin and disheveled light grey suit. He travels to Luna Bay with his Lexus, and his son, a teenager named Finn Little in the car as well, so the two can hit the waves. (He is no longer married but believes there is a chance they will re-unite.) Cage, we find out, is interested in purchasing this house, which he wants to buy whenever it’s available, the one that belonged to his family and had him live in it until he moved out at the age of fifteen. When his father expired, though, his mother brought him to California. (This is also why to Australian audiences he is, quite shockingly for them, like a quintessential American geek.) Right now, he says, if I buy this home (that is going for 1.6 million dollars), it will be like putting back the good times.
This backward-looking fantasy, in the beginning, is a cue that Cage’s character is in some kind of pathetic imagination. As the film further goes on, his neurotic cringing sentiment starts to transform into a cringeworthy dream. “The Surfer” is one of those savagely brutal comedies where our protagonist is out of luck due to someone conspiring against him as if there was a universal plot to ruin him. The genre of such comedies includes “What About Bob?” and “Neighbors”, also Oliver Stone’s “U-Turn” genre which probably goes back to “Green Acres”.
Things begin to turn for the worse for Cage when he attempts to get his house. He was outbid by an all-cash offer. He is verbally assaulted by surfer-jock bullies who are local ‘bay boys’ who won’t let him surf so he’s hit with the slogan that, if you don’t live here, don’t surf here. The officer, Justin Rosniak, who he turns to for help, ends up treating him like one of the Bay Boys. Some bay boys steal his surfboard and place it up the door of their surf shack. They later claim the board has been there for seven years.
You know that feeling when sometimes your phone is out of battery? Well, Ian could not even buy a coffee when his phone had run out of battery, so he really had to rely on the guy working at the coffee stall as opposed to borrowing one.
We can tell that he is an Aussie macho terror but does he also look like he’s losing his game? Slipping into a parallel universe? With a busted face, a wrecked car, and everything gone, runs around in a hobo style, wishing he were anywhere but here. Does this mean he’s a lunatic who actually believes the dented red jalopy that he lives in is a Ford Taurus? Or do you reckon the irritable hobo (Nicholas Cassim) obsessively follows the instructions of the Cage character?
I would describe Cage as likely having a medium-grade Nicolas Cage field day and progressively removing clothing as well as pretty much everything else on-screen in a very rough, very ugly way that you know is going to take a toll on his pretty hot body. It was evident from how he muttered and grimaced. He was disgruntled and felt hopeless. He obscenely rubbed filth in his mouth and couldn’t seem to care. He thought about eating the carcass of a rodent but instead, used it as an object. (The best line in the film: ‘Eat the rat!’) That’s not all there might have also been a projection of Cage’s face eating a giant bug on the screen, and boy was it mesmerizing. He did not just open little egg-shaped stones, he gulped down ‘the yolks’ right from his hands. Agnes Varda introduced mildly potent drugs that added to the surreality of the film, as well as lizards porcupines, and zoom-outs looking through the waters in a quickly-boring frame.
Does it even matter? Quite the contrary. “the Surfer,” in its tattered gonzo manner, is particularly subversive of the new wealth and new tribalistic fashions of hypermasculinity. That public beach is one pole of the mind of Cage who cannot reach any of the surf-bum bullies who are well-off beneficiaries shielding their exclusive rich enclave. Cage, by contrast, is a man on the edge having lost the family, the house, the roots, and even a manly ‘anchor’. The main bay boy also happens to be an athletic middle-aged dude Scally (Julian McMahon) who turns out to have headed a local male cult that practices the principle that ‘you can’t surf unless you pay the price.’ The implication is that the Cage character has to lose everything in order to free himself, to come through his detention and his yuppie aspirations out of the other side.
Or something. “The Surfer” does have its funny moments but eventually loses its plot however the stereotype of the character dominant is too clumsy and broad to justify its universal intent. It is not that I do abandon the promise that Nicolas Cage is capable of extensive but extremely skillful overacting. It is that I take it just sufficiently seriously not to be forced to watch it only in the dead of the night.
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