There are places on this earth where wind, gravity, and air pressure can thrust thousands of gallons of water up from the ocean into immense, towering walls. What's even more amazing is that there are people who will stand on a plank of fiberglass at the top of such a wall and skim down its face. Voluntarily. Eagerly. They're insane, but they're called big wave surfers, and Stacy Peralta's thoroughly enjoyable new film, Riding Giants, tells their story, from the early days of surfing, through its impact on the music and movies of the 50s and 60s, to the exploits of its most dedicated daredevils, past and present. It's just about as fun as a history lesson can be.
Most of the fun is supplied by a cast of colorful characters — like Laird Hamilton and Greg Noll — each of them a surfing icon who gladly and vividly recounts the first day he or she caught a particular wave or got up the gumption to do what had never been done. And Peralta is willing to listen. His film finds a sweet spot between amusement and reverence, honoring the sport by neither taking it too seriously nor gawking at its proponents like they're freaks. It listens to their tales, stands alongside them as they gaze out at the foamy blue, and gives us a pretty good idea of what it's like to walk a mile in their flip-flops.
The movie is filled with stunning footage of painful wipeouts, just-in-time rescues, and amazing physical phenomena, but it also races through boxes and boxes of still photos using animation to make them pop out of the screen like the 3D vistas of a View-Master reel. The effect is similar to the treatment of photos in The Kid Stays in the Picture, a fitting embellishment that makes flat frames seem as thick and glowing as the translucent tubes that the surfers chase. The pictures are propelled by an eclectic mix of songs, including music born of the surf era like the guitar solos of Dick Dale — and music that just sounds like it was born of that era, like the songs of the Stray Cats — as well as modern adrenaline pumpers like Linkin Park and the Hives.
As a dynamic collage, Riding Giants is a dervish, so much so that it's often hard to tell, especially in the movie's rapid first third, whether we're seeing the actual event being discussed or just something similar. But in general the footage is well integrated and frequently awe inspiring. Peralta has a good sense of pace and knows when to be manic and when to slow things down to a dramatic crawl. He has a firm grasp of his material, although he may have a bit too much of it. There's always a bigger wave waiting to be discovered, and for a time it feels like the film may show us all of them, like the projectionist may have spliced one of the reels into a continuous loop whose waves are going to pound the shores into the wee hours.
But the movie eventually arrives at a rousing conclusion, and when one of the surfers seems offended by the term "beach bum," we understand him a little better than we might have at the outset. He might be certifiable, but he's no bum. And although the sport is associated with the beach, that's just because the beach is next to the water. It's like calling star gazers "hill bums" because of where they plant their feet; it's not a love of the hill that turns their eyes upward.
When the Waterboys' anthemic "This is the Sea" plays over the movie's final minutes, any excess repetition is forgiven; all else is forgotten but the mysterious magnitude of the water. "That was the river," Mike Scott sings, "and this is the sea."
I'm not sure if big wave surfers hear music when they ride waves, but this movie makes me think they do: the music of the ocean, the rhythm of their pulse.