Chasing Mavericks (2012)

Chasing Mavericks arrives from 2012, a biographical drama about the Santa Cruz surfer Jay Moriarity, directed by Curtis Hanson and completed by Michael Apted when Hanson's health failed. Gerard Butler plays Frosty Hesson, the neighbor who pulls a drowning boy from the surf and later agrees to train him for the enormous winter break at Half Moon Bay. The film is sincere, unhurried, and entirely convinced that dedication is its own reward. It grossed seven million dollars against a twenty million dollar budget. The sea did not care, and neither, evidently, did the audience.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the cupboard is bare. The cast is white and the story concerns white surfers in Santa Cruz, so nothing here reaches for representational weight. Women occupy the familiar stations of supportive wife, worried mother, and eventual girlfriend, and the narrative belongs to the men and the water. There is no queer presence, no racial commentary, no economic critique, no body-positive counterargument to elite athletic conditioning. El Niño appears solely as a scheduling device, a swell with a deadline. The film has no interest in instructing anyone about society.

The mentor's foundation pillars of surfing supply a mild strain of self-improvement preaching: paddle thirty-six miles, hold your breath four minutes, write an essay about your feelings. These are platitudes about personal grit, not politics, and they land softly. Brenda Hesson dies of a stroke, Jay rides the wave, and a title card notes that he married Kim and drowned at twenty-two in the Maldives. A gentle film about a short life. It asks nothing of us but attention, and it is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.