The writer and producer David Milch tried to say something cosmic about surfing in last summer's HBO series, John From Cincinnati, though an undertow of bad reviews and low Nielsen ratings quickly proved him wrong. His God-and-waves premise, however, gets some support from this summer's feature film Surfwise, which looks at a real-life family of world-class surfers and the spiritual obsession that compels them toward a life of swells and crashes, both on sea and on land.
Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz is the primordial seeker in this bliss-following documentary, which — much like Robert Evans's auto-hagiography, The Kid Stays In The Picture — mixes new interviews with vintage imagery. Like Evans, this patriarch is both a studly screen presence and an unreliable narrator, one of those uptight free spirits who decry the usual orthodoxies while clinging to their own alternate version. The Stanford-trained physician devised what seemed like an optimal way to live and, bopping from beach to beach across America in a 22-foot family camper, fathered nine lieges — eight boys and one girl — along the way. The kids enjoyed a brightly idyllic childhood — essentially all recess and no school — mixed in with internecine power struggles under Doc's autocratic rule, which led to a darkly idle adulthood for many of them.
Half-hardass, half-horndog, Doc is the prototype of rad, so much so that his kids wind up with misgivings among their blessings: They describe scant meals, meager possessions, and improvised methods for muffling the relentless nightly sounds of parental gyrations. Every Paskowitz has their say about their dizzying highs and lows, from Doc (now 87) and his wife, Juliette, down to the baby, Joshua, now a 33-year-old struggling rocker. There are some riveting sibling rivalries fought on multiple fronts, along with a welcome amount of filial piety.
Like the family, the film is sprawling, raucous, and affectionate. Arriving on screens a few months after Daniel Plainview's emotional gushers in There Will Be Blood, Surfwise offers another lesson in extreme fatherhood, though the Paskowitz family group-hugs in the end. While their dad could surely outdo anyone else's, and the whole brood excelled in all things cool, they discovered later than most that life's not always a day at the beach.
