Cage is the titular character of “The Surfer,” however, it’s only during the last minute of the film that he steps on a surfboard. The film in spite of being located on a muscle beach in Australia is not about surfing. It is about male fears, male strength, male midlife crisis, males engaging in rituals involving pain and dominion, and to a certain extent, how much drama Nicolas Cage can extract from all of that. Featuring in the Cannes midnight show, “The Surfer” is just a plain strange movie and that is also one of the reasons that it is perfect for midnight programming it’s the kind of movie where watching it the traditional way is not an option, one can only sit back and ‘go with it.’
“Cage, for his part, makes that easy to do.” Cage self-introduction quite impressive, indeed, these days. If weekend high twits Leon never went dancing. Everything that was known, inquired and wreaked was executed in one fell swoop. I just wish that in ‘The Surfer’ Lorcan Finnegan, and Thomas Martin who has written the film, took a more docu dramatic approach to the film rather than making it pretend to be disappearing from the theater altogether. The movie is at least trying for something, albeit being very sketchy about the conception behind got.
This is the sort of perverse logical puzzle film where you can bet the title character is going to be credited as… The Surfer. (No name given.) For some time, however, Cage appears to take him for a run-of-the-mill, although a rather frantic one, finance buy in a drowsy beard and wrinkled light-grey suit. He drives to Luna Bay in his Lexus, with his teen son (Finn Little) who is evidently over the sun so that the two can surf together. (He is divorced from his spouse but is fond of ideas that they will reconcile). Ackles narrates his Case, by the way, wants to purchase a piece of land by the ocean shore which is indeed, or rather used to be in his possession until the age of fifteen. His father passed away and his mother then gave him residence in California. (This is the source of his apparent dislocation, making him a somewhat americanised mapoosh foreign whack out in Australia). And now as we are witness to the circumstances, he believes that if he is capable of acquiring that property for 1.6 million dollars everything will revert back to how it used to be.
Right from the beginning, the Easter egg of Cage’s backward gazing fantasy serves as a tell of the life he is living as pathetic one’s day dreaming perspective. But as events trace their evolution through the movie, the embarrassing whips and toungues of his eclectic nostalgia begin to project and dissolve into a dream world; “The Surfer” is one of those comedies of masochism, where in a cosmic twist, everything tends to go wrong and conspire against the lead protagonist the very fabric of ‘What About Bob’, ‘Neighbors’ and Oliver Stone’s ‘U Turn’ conceit that has its root in “Green acres”.
Cage’s saga of going through his deal to buy his house starts to descend downwards when he is outbid for an all cash in offer. On the beach, the local the bay boys who are surfer jock straw dog bullies harass him from surfing telling him the rule of “if you don’t live here, don’t surf here”. The cop, played by Justin Rosniak to whom he seeks an appeal also just mocks him similar to the bay boys. They took away his surfboard and put it somewhere above the door of their surf hut and falsely claimed it to have been there for seven years.
When he has no phone battery left, he is unable to purchase even a coffee and the man at the coffee stand, instead of offering him a loan, looks at him as if he is a beggar.
We can see that he is a prime example of Aussie macho abuse, And is he also going mad, losing sanity? Beaten and bleeding and with his car smashed and stolen, he now goes around like a wretched. Is the rundown red jalopy he begins shattering his? How about the grouchy drifter (Nicholas Cassim) who keeps stalking, could he be… the Cage character?
As for the Cage, this is what can be called, in professional terms, a mid-tier Nicolas Cage field day because he goes through numerous stages of despair and rage which are so deeply plastinated that they are just right to be put into a focus. He looks like he is bossed around all day long. Depressed and trying to get high with a dirty orange beach sink. Depressed AND… how can one forget his nuke, “Eat the fucking rat.” Honestly, I thought a huge real bug scene would happen after Cage swallowed the small egg. And as it turned out, that was not the case either. The starting psychedelic underwater world theme is assisted by some random fantasist visions of lizards and porcupines and endless sea view screens.Is there a point? There actually is. The Surfer, in its threadbare gonzo way, is a parable: of new money, and the new tribal customs of retro-masculinity. That public beach is off limits to Cage as the sullen surf bum bullies are trust fund kids protecting their enclave. Cage, on the other hand, is about to lose his family, his house, his past and his manhood’s anchor. One of the bay boys, an athletic middle aged dude named Scally (Julian McMahon) turns out to provide services as a local head of a men’s cult in which the slogan song is: ‘Suffer or Your Surf’. The significance of this is, the character Cage has to go down to the level of basest animal instincts to cleanse himself, to see the light at the end of the tunnel and the times in a yuppy fantasy.
Or something. The Surfer is enjoyable, up to a point, there is far too much level and cursory feel to it which in my view would make it quite less popular in the real world. Not that I do not believe Nicolas Cage would not deliver on the dramatic overacting that was promised to him. It is that because I take it seriously I don’t want to see it come out til’ clock strikes midnight.
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