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A
NEW WAVE : BLUE CRUSH
USA 2002
: John Stockwell : 104 mins
As teen movies
go, Blue Crush is a distinct cut above average – against all expectations,
there’s plenty here to engage, entertain and perhaps even impress audiences
far beyond its target demographic of 11-16 year old girls. If, that is,
such potential customers can see beyond their own snobbery, and also the
film’s unpromising title, trailer and poster: all of which suggest airhead
surfer-chick nonsense along the lines of Britney Spears’ instantly forgettable
Crossroads. In fact,
the tough-talking heroines of Blue Crush would be horrified to
see themselves posing so vacantly on the movie’s poster looking like the
‘Baywatch Barbies’ they instinctively despise.
The opening
credits provide the first upbeat sign – the screenplay, by director Stockwell
and Lizzy Weiss (who also provides the ‘story’), turns out to be based
on a 1998 article entitled ‘Surf
Girls of Maui’ by none other than Susan Orlean of Adaptation
fame. Though it’s tempting to consider what Adaptation’s Charlie
(and Donald!) Kaufman might have come up with, Weiss and Stockwell do
a good, relatively orthodox job, even if they really only take the Orlean
article - which concentrates on 16-year-old Theresa
McGregor - as a very loose inspiration.
While McGregor
lived with her parents, received schooling at home and had already secured
enough commercial sponsorship to enable her to surf  as
much as she wanted, Blue Crush’s Anne Marie Chadwick (Kate Bosworth)
has things rather tougher, at least at the start. Slightly older than
McGregor (20?), she inhabits in a rickety beachfront shack with her wayward
14-year-old sister Penny (Mika Boorem) – in a minor variation on the similarly
Hawaiian-set and surfing-themed Lilo
and Stitch, Anne Marie was forced to take over parental duties
when her mother ran off to ‘the mainland’ with a new man. While dreaming
of turning pro, Anne Marie makes ends meet by working as a maid – along
with her surfing pals Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake)
- in a huge five-star hotel full of mostly boorishly messy but extremely
rich mainlanders. One of the less inconsiderate guests is nice-guy NFL
star Matt (Matthew Davis), with whom Anne Marie soon strikes up a romance
- much to the chagrin of her trainer Eden, who points out that, with a
major tournament only days away, Anne Marie must resist all distractions…
Though its
structure follows the perfunctory format of Hollywood sports pictures
– the impending tournament, the nagging trainer, the romantic diversion,
obstacles inspirationally overcome – Blue Crush transcends the
usual limitations by paying unexpectedly close attention to reality. “You
guys get out here, I’ll go find some parking,” says Eden, driving Anne
Marie and Lena to the big tournament – although apparently a throwaway
line, it’s typical of Weiss and Stockwell’s determination to avoid the
easy route. Unlike in the fantasy world of Jennifer Lopez’s recent Maid
in Manhattan, the Blue Crush girls really do get their
hands quite disgustingly dirty at work – they’re graphically shown dealing
with excrement, vomit and carelessly-discarded condoms.
The ‘mainlanders’
– Matt’s fellow footballers are a pair of colossal African-Americans –
are initially a source of mild comic relief, but these easy laughs are
abruptly converted to more serious aims when the pair get up on stage
to cavort around during a themed ‘Hawaiian’ party night at the hotel.
The crassness of the event appals Anne Marie, who makes a hasty exit and
jumps into the nearest pool, as if soiled by her proximity to such a grotesque
distortion of her island’s culture.
Not that Anne
Marie is exactly the most typically ‘Hawaiian’ person herself – it’s slightly
disconcerting that once again in a Hollywood movie the ‘least ethnic’
person on view is the one audiences are invited to identify and sympathise
with. Anne Marie’s relationship with the feisty Hispanic Eden directly
parallels that between Paul Walker and Vin Diesel in The
Fast and the Furious (which also featured Rodriguez), and between
Eminem and Mekhi Phifer in 8
Mile – for reasons of demographic appeal, in each case the non-white
‘trainer’ elects to take a back seat and allow their more-gifted ‘protégé’
to take the limelight.
But while 8
Mile (also produced by Brian Grazer) presented a cartoon vision of
Detroit poverty and racism, Blue Crush feels much more convincing
in every respect all the way up to a climax that doesn’t quite conform
to our expectations. Unlike 8 Mile’s woeful scriptwriter Scott
Silver, Weiss and Stockwell remember the vital lesson that Rocky actually
lost at the end of the first movie. Anne Marie doesn’t even get
through to the final of her tournament, but does enough to secure
her goals of sponsorship deals and a front-page picture on the cover of
Surfing magazine. There’s clearly some kind of ‘Kournikova syndrome’
going on here – it’s clear that the stunning Anne Maries of this world
don’t actually have to be dominant champions. Blue Crush features
no less than five real-life leading female surfers as themselves (Anne
Marie’s final ride is against Kate Skarratt), and none of them are exactly
conventional pin-up material.
The presence
of Skarratt and company is another encouraging sign that the film-makers
have, for once, bothered to get things right. The surfing footage is suitably
spectacular, but within the realms of plausibility – and many of the rides
are clearly being performed by the actors themselves. David Hennings’
limpid cinematography, while featuring several “how the f**k did they
get that shot” moments, takes a slightly rough-edged, Dogtown-ish
approach to the ‘endless summer’ world of Hawaii, while editor Emma E
Hickox manages to stay just the right side of hyperkinetic MTV excess
– and leaves in one very neat sight gag, when a surfing dog rides his
luck before being rather rudely ejected into the waves.
Though surprisingly
serious about its subject, Blue Crush is never po-faced. Apart
from the very opening shot (a dream sequence in which the surf is seen
in distorted LSD-style colours) we’re mercifully free of the ‘trippy’
1970s visuals of pictures like Crystal Voyager. Weiss and Stockwell
also nimbly avoid an even more perilous danger – their jargon-light dialogue
features none of the zen-surf bombast that the surf genre, whether literary
( Kem Nunn’s The Dogs of Winter) or cinematic (Point
Break and Big Wednesday) or can be prone to. ‘Little Tuesday’
this emphatically isn’t. In fact, by the end you may be so won
over that a sequel isn’t an unappealing prospect. Blue Crush 2
– now there’s a challenge for the Kaufman brothers…
1st
April, 2003
(seen UCI MetroCentre, Gateshead, 30th March)
click
here for a short review of Blue Crush
by Neil
Young
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