For the unnamed central character played by Oscar winner Nicolas Cage in director Lorcan Finnegan’s (Nocebo, Vivarium, Without Name) latest film, The Surfer, nostalgia doubles as prison and poison. Despite the obvious signifiers and markers of material success and class status, including a new Lexus, a state-of-the-art smartphone, and a bespoke linen suit, Cage’s Australian-born, American-raised character wants nothing more than to repurchase the beachfront property once owned by his family and take his teen son (Finn Little) surfing.
Almost immediately, however, surfing becomes a near-unobtainable pleasure, blocked by local bully-boys and their men’s rights leader, Scally (Julian McMahon), an overturned, self-styled guru born to generational wealth with an entitled, prickish attitude to match. While Scully and his crew keep the beach clear of non-locals, using a combination of threats, intimidation, and violence, Cage’s character unwittingly slips into the kind of all-encompassing existential rut that would give Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) pause: To leave the parking adjoining the beach would mean to accept not just a temporary defeat, but at least in the surfer’s irrational mind, a permanent one.
So he stays (and stays), repeatedly calling his mortgage broker and bank lender, hoping to scrounge up an extra $100K to close the deal on his former home. That home, overlooking the beach and filled with hazy, long-ago memories of a once stable home life, exists firmly in the past, but for the surfer, his former home seems to have a magical, even talismanic nature: Repurchase the family home and reconnect with his estranged son and soon-to-be ex-wife.
For Cage’s character, however, even as the goal retreats into the distance, his stubbornness gets the better of him. He refuses to leave and in refusing to leave, subjects himself to all manner of degradations, both at the hands of Scully and his feral cult and through time and the elements, the loss of those aforementioned signifiers and markers of material success and class status: His phone dies, his wallet disappears, followed by his car, then his jacket and shoes. Sunbaked and sunburned, the surfer turns into a reflection of the bum he encountered in the film’s opening moments.
By turns a deftly written, cringe-inducing descent into the central character’s psychological disintegration, an exploration, if not an outright dissection, of masculinity in all its toxic forms, and the dissolution of the unstable line between subjective and objective reality, The Surfer not only exceeds expectations, especially for Cage’s variable, late-career choices, but as a ceaselessly engaging example of a man-in-crisis sub-genre as well-directed as it is acted and written.
Working from an original screenplay written by Thomas Martin (Prime Target, White Widow, Ripper Street), Finnegan relies heavily on a self-conscious mix of old-school filming techniques, heightening the surfer’s increasing isolation from the world and people around him through long camera lenses, fast, ‘70s-style zooms, and repeated shots of Australian wildlife, the last to suggest the surfer’s unwanted devolution into a primal state of nature, one where Hobbesian one-against-all colors every interaction between the surfer and the locals.
Of course, direction and writing mean almost nothing without the performances to support and/or elevate both. In that respect, Cage more than delivers, reining in the usual excesses that have often led to criticism, justified and unjustified alike. Over the course of The Surfer’s running time, the title character spectacularly unravels in classic Cage fashion, fighting a losing battle against the humiliation, contempt, and ostracism levied in his general direction. Cage, however, gives him just enough layering and nuance to make his self-created predicament a deeply sympathetic one. It’s also one of Cage’s best performances in years.
The Surfer opens theatrically in North America on Friday, May 2nd, via Roadside Attractions.
