100 Foot Wave

 The one-hundred foot wave is a chimera pursued by surfers in the 2021 documentary of the same name.  Probably, the wave doesn't exist, at least in any place accessible to surfers, and, if such waves occur, they may arise in conditions that can't be surfed.  From the evidence presented in Chris Smith's HBO series, 100 Foot Wave, the peak waves are probably about 75 to 80 feet high -- not exactly a hundred feet but still a spectacular and awesome spectacle, particularly with the minute figure of a surfer glissading down the green escarpment.  Smith's six-part series is replete with astonishing footage, but, more or less, vacuous.  The show would be tighter and more impressive if it were half the length.  Like many extended documentaries on Cable TV, the show expands to fill time allotted to it -- the result is that the documentary is highly repetitive.  Curiously, it is also oddly unsatisfactory as an examination of its subject.  One would expect a film of this kind to be exhaustive about the strategies and esthetics of big wave surfing.  Like any other complex art form, big wave surfing requires a tutorial -- we need to be told what surfing terms mean and need to understand the dynamics of these huge waves.  Furthermore, we need to understand the strategies involved in surfing these kinds of enormous moving waterfalls -- what are the surfers trying to accomplish as they ride these waves?  How do they seek to avoid catastrophe?  What are the parts of the wave that can be surfed?  And why?  None of these questions are answered -- the viewer is presented with a pictorial spectacle, filmed from air and land and water, drones hovering overhead, but we don't really understand what we are seeing and none of the surfing jargon used in the film is ever explicated.  We come away from six hours of documentary not knowing anything more about big wave surfing than we knew at the beginning of the film.  I presume that surfing one of these waves requires a delicate balance of athleticism, good luck, and intricate strategy -- the operation is probably as complicated as playing a string quartet, but the movie doesn't do anything to help us appreciate the technique of big wave surfing.

The movie chronicles the adventures of a good-natured but obsessive surfer named Garrett McNamara, a happy, if dim-witted, knucklehead.  McNamara is a professional surfer -- this means that he travels around the world on the money of sponsors looking for impressive waves to surf.  We don't learn until the fourth episode something that should be obvious, but isn't -- professional surfers are, in effect, performers who calculate their effects to impress the camera; as it turns out, professional surfing is a form of cinema and, if performances aren't documented, they are futile. In the last episode, one of the surfers whom we have been following as a protagonist in the series, skis down an enormous wave in a competition.  Unfortunately, several other participant have been injured and are being dragged out of the ferocious waters and, so, all eyes are on the rescue -- as a result the surfer's conquest of the mighty wave isn't documented, no one films his descent down the towering wall of water, and, so, for all practical purposes (including for the documentary) the accomplishment simply doesn't exist.  The need to document surfing feats results in extraordinary coverage -- we see surfers from every possible angle in all possible circumstances and the film is visually spectacular.  Indeed, as the movie progresses toward its anti-climactic ending -- COVID shuts down the professional surfing circuit -- the cameramen who document the surfing become more and more of a presence in the film.  

In broad terms, the series' narrative is basic:  a big wave surfer from Hawaii, Garrett McNamara stumbles onto enormous waves breaking at Nazare on the coast of Portugal.  The sea surges over a five-thousand foot deep canyon just off-shore and, then, crashes over shallows resulting in waves that are routinely 50 feet tall.  (The highest wave surfed in the movie is about 75 feet tall.)  At first, McNamara and his crew are the only surfers on the beach, a desolate-looking stretch of cliffs foaming with water, some sand, and a menacing-looking medieval fortress.  (A famous surfing film was called The Endless Summer, but the big waves at Nazare appear in the winter, usually in February.)  The enormous waves require special techniques.  Access to the waves is by "tow-surfing" -- this means that jet skis tow McNamara and his fellow surfers out to the big waves and, then, ride the surf themselves in order to rescue surfers when the inevitable occurs:  they wipe out and are crushed by the mountains of water.  As the film progresses, several injuries occur -- a woman is almost drowned, one surfer named Cotty, an Irish chap, breaks his back, and McNamara suffers a variety of serious, disabling traumas.  McNamara also begins to fear the monstrous waves. When the series begins, he's 42, an old man among surfers  and 52 at the end of movie.  Over the ten year period, Nazare becomes a famous surfing destination -- at the end of the series, during a "tow-surf" competition held at the location, thousands of spectators line the cliffs, dozens of TV cameras are trained on the raging water, and the sea is full of scores of surfers and their tow-crews on jet skis.  (Safety considerations require that the tow-ski operators be accompanied by other jet skis who can rescue them if they are overwhelmed in the flood -- it's a sort of infinite recursion, the surfers have rescuers on hand and the rescuers have rescuers and so on.  In the last episode, the big wipe-out in the competition involves two jet-ski operators who are almost drowned.)  The film is about aging, at least in part -- McNamara tries to defy age, but with less success that he hopes.  We see him brooding about having to give up surfing which is his only real passion.  At the end of the film, he returns to the water for a last hurrah, overcomes his fear, wipes out and gets "pounded" violently by the huge wave, an experience that makes him feel "at one with the wave" and that he enjoys.  There's a fair amount of New Age theosophy in the film -- surfers travel to Bali, for  instance, to consult with fitness gurus and, everyone practices a lot of yoga.  The waves are routinely described as divine, as watery deities, a formulation that doesn't seem too exotic given the awesome quality of the vast peaks of toppling water.  At the end of the film, McNamara comes to conclude that all waves are one, that a four-foot wave just as much as an eighty-foot wave is a manifestations of the godhead, and that surfing, in which the athlete lives intensely in the present moment ("neither past nor the future exist" McNamara says) is always on the 100-foot wave -- the 100-foot wave is a fantasy but one that sustains surfers and, in the end, the film seems to declare that, properly viewed, all waves are part of the 100 foot monster of god.  

There are elements of the film that are discordant.  For four episodes, the show depicts the slow evolution of technology and tow-ski techniques required to put surfers on the big waves at Nazare.  The mere fact that anyone can surf these sorts of waves is celebrated as a spectacular feat.  And, then, out of nowhere, some kid appears and uses the 70 foot waves as a playground but ski-board techniques -- he flips himself up over the wave spinning on his surfboard or somersaults over the crest of the flood.  Suddenly, it seems that merely skating down the tumbling waterfall of the wave isn't sufficient and the surfer has to do elaborate tricks as well.  The effect is that the accomplishments of the ordinary, conventional surfers are minimized.  It's seems strange to introduce an outsider into the film who's skills make the other protagonists, particularly McNamara, seem prosaic.  There's some interesting material about McNamara's childhood; his mother was a gullible fool who followed some kind of charismatic holy man and, for several years, McNamara and his big brother, wandered around the country barefoot, sleeping outdoors and eating garbage to survive.  "He did not have a normal childhood," McNamara's wife insist, an understatement to be sure.  McNamara's fight to return to surfing after some awful injuries is gruesome but somewhat inspirational.  The film has a impressive score by Philip Glass and the camerawork is, often, exceptionally beautiful.