Having made an award-winning debut at Sundance and now opening in limited release, director
Stacy Peralta's
Riding Giants is an enthralling, if not all-encompassing, near-encyclopedic docu about the big kahuna of surfing--big-wave riding.
Story
Riding Giants opens with a kinetic piece, "1000 Years of Surfing in 2 Minutes or Less," that follows the sport's ancient Polynesian origins to its outlaw in 19th century Hawaii, to its introduction to sun-loving Californians by Hawaiian Olympic athlete Duke Kahanamoku in the 1900s. From here, the film focuses on three top wave bravers of their times, stitching together interviews, a rocking soundtrack, and best of all, surfing footage your eyes would tell you was CGI if you didn't know it was real. The Idyllic Age of Surfing sets it off, as a handful of surf bums hit the Hawaiian North Shore in the '40s and '50s, living off the land and by the seats of their trunks all to catch that
one tasty wave. We meet that era's beefy, foul-mouthed Greg "Da Bull" Noll, king of the Makaha waves complete with jailhouse-striped shorts, 11-foot board and take-no-prisoners attitude. Onward ho, to the early '90s Nor Cal coast: The rocky Half Moon Bay spot Mavericks opens up big time thanks to renegade loner Jeff Clark, who'd been paddling out to his long-secret spot since the 1970s. It's a chilly, shark-laden, treacherous and wholly forbidding break that nonetheless attracted champions from around the world--some of whom, like Mark Foo, lost their lives among the serrated coastline. Jump to the present day: Meet the new millennium hero of big-wave riding, Laird Hamilton, a surf god in every sense of the word, who pioneered the non-traditional idea of surfing the biggest waves on the planet by getting towed in to them on a jet ski.
Direction
A follow-up to his well-received skateboarding documentary
Dogtown and Z-Boys,
Peralta's latest is a fascinating, if almost necessarily flawed, look at a specific branch of the sport. It's too broad a subject, with too much ground to cover to narrow it down to a few American heroes and their favorite locales, but
Peralta attacks it with the gusto of Greg Noll at terrifying Waimea in '64.
Giants' first third is by far the most engaging, with its sunny surf bums who return a little older and wiser to offer a few apt quotes between the grainy, spliced-in video and
Gidget clips. This is
Peralta at his best; as in
Dogtown, he works magic blending a hodgepodge of period music, found footage and interviews with aging heroes--like Noll, still beefy and still entertainingly foul-mouthed--whose recollections are perhaps larger than life.
Peralta makes a somewhat wobbly transition from balmy '60s Hawaii to wintry '90s Northern Cali; this second third of the movie is appropriately darker, colder. Its surfers' stories are more about surviving the perilous spot than the joy of the sport--with good reason, given some of the bone-crunching wipeouts these people lived to describe. When the movie turns to the present, though,
Peralta makes much the same mistake he was criticized for with
Dogtown as
Giants turns into more promotion than true documentary. It focuses almost solely on Hamilton (not surprisingly, Hamilton was an executive producer on the film and involved from the start ) and goes so far as to tout him as the best big-wave surfer in history, an arguable statement given some of the footage of the previous 70 minutes. Gone are the salad days of surfing-as-ethos, replaced by corporate sponsorship, slick commercialism, high-tech equipment and
GQ layouts. But despite its glossy, airbrushed feel, the footage of big, golden Hamilton braving barrels a Mack truck could drive through untouched is nothing short of jaw dropping.
Bottom Line
Its limitations notwithstanding, you can't help but be sucked in by the truly unbelievable footage of pint-sized figures dropping fearlessly down a sheer wall of water the size of an ocean liner, getting pounded mercilessly by it, and running back to catch the next one; if you're not inspired to hit the waves yourself, at least you'll discover why some people do.