Something to watch tonight: Point Break

The revered crit­ic David Thomson has a new book out¹ in which he ques­tions many of his own long-held assump­tions about cinema itself. At the age of 85, Thomson is hav­ing second thoughts about wheth­er the greatest art form of them all has actu­ally been a net good to soci­ety or not.

I haven’t read the book yet, just this pro­file of Thomson by the NY Times’ A.O. Scott (gift link), so I may not have appre­hen­ded his point fully, although Scott describes it thus:

According to Thomson, movies — espe­cially American movies — have white­washed his­tory, glor­i­fied viol­ence and made role mod­els out of thugs, nar­ciss­ists and mur­der­ers. The con­sequences shape our pub­lic life. Donald Trump “is our movie man,” Thomson writes, mean­ing that Trump’s pres­id­ency, which Thomson sees as a cata­strophe, was fore­told and to some extent made pos­sible by Hollywood.

Thomson’s main example is Coppola’s The Godfather, a mas­ter­piece (obvi­ously) but one in which the audi­ence finds them­selves being won over by the char­ac­ter of Michael Corleone whose mor­al cor­rup­tion begins explic­ably – and tac­tic­ally – but who grows into a mon­ster. But he’s our mon­ster, the char­ac­ter we are asked to engage emo­tion­ally with, and (argu­ably) identi­fy with:

“You could argue that ‘The Godfather’ is the key film,” Thomson said. “It did everything the medi­um is meant to do. It had a gang of abso­lutely bril­liant people. That film brought togeth­er tal­ents of an incred­ible nature.” In addi­tion to Coppola and a cast that included Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall and a parade of first-rate char­ac­ter act­ors, the movie owes its place in the can­on to people like Dean Tavoularis, the pro­duc­tion design­er; the cine­ma­to­graph­er Gordon Willis; and the sound edit­or Walter Murch.

“It was a smash hit,” Thomson went on. “It won all the prizes, and yet what is not talked about very much is what the film is about. For me what the film is about is per­suad­ing men that they want to be in the gang and in the fam­ily, and they want to do the ter­rible things the guys do and they want to shut the women out of the room.”

As I say, I haven’t read Thomson’s book yet, but I won­der wheth­er there isn’t an even bet­ter example of that per­ni­cious way that art can find to make the utterly immor­al attractive.

In Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break – cel­eb­rat­ing its 35^th birth­day this week – the ambi­tious young FBI detect­ive hero (played by Keanu Reeves) is cor­rup­ted by the tar­get of his invest­ig­a­tion, a free-spirited surfer bank rob­ber named Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). The pseudo-spiritual liber­tari­an­ism of Bodhi’s life­style con­trasts with the tightly knot­ted world of law enforce­ment – “Guess we just have an asshole short­age,” Reeves’ Johnny Utah is told by his man­ic boss (John C. McGinley). Under his breath he replies, “Not so far.”

Before watch­ing ViaVision’s hand­some new col­lect­ible 4K disc, I had­n’t seen Point Break since it came out in 1991 and it had settled into my memory as one of the 90s high concept dumb action films that had also become a bit of a punch­line in films like Hot Fuzz. The taut set-pieces – the foot chase through the back­yards and homes around Venice Beach is a high­light – the lov­ingly pho­to­graphed damp male bod­ies in the late California sun, and that phe­nom­en­al sky­diving sequence, are what we recall. That and the etern­al ques­tion of wheth­er Bodhi surfs his way to free­dom off the coast of Australia² at the end.

But here is where I come back to Thomson’s “what is not talked about is what the film is about.” From his very first appear­ance, Swayze is so mag­net­ic and so attract­ive, it is as if he’s walked on to the screen from a dif­fer­ent film entirely. All of the tri­bal groups presen­ted – cops and crims – are like car­ni­val sideshow char­ac­ters but Bodhi feels real, com­fort­ably inhab­it­ing his own skin in a way that Utah can only dream of. What a movie star Swayze was! His pres­ence unbal­ances the film in a way that I think is not accidental.

We fall for him like Utah does but then we find out what he is cap­able of – his psy­cho­path­ic dis­reg­ard for any­one but him­self and his capa­city for viol­ence to get what he wants. But by then it’s too late – for Utah and for the audi­ence. We want Utah to get his man, of course, we are not totally amoral.

Or are we? By the end, even Utah does­n’t want that and he throws away his badge in dis­gust. Bodhi wins. One of the worst people in the world gets what he wants and we have been enter­tained watch­ing him get it. The curse of Hollywood.

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Where to watch Point Break

Physical media: 4K UHD from ViaVision. Available in NZ from JB Hi-Fi.

Aotearoa: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on SBS On Demand or digit­al rental

Canada: Streaming non Criterion Channel, AMC+ or Crave (free with ads)

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel, AMC+, Peacock, Philo, Roku or Kanopy (from par­ti­cip­at­ing lib­rar­ies), Fubo (free with ads) or Shout TV (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on Prime Video

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Point Break (2015)

The 2015 remake of Point Break star­ring Edgar Ramirez as Bodhi made it into the “Shun at all costs” sec­tion of my RNZ sur­vey of the films of 2016.

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Sam Neill

The news of the week has been dom­in­ated by the sud­den passing of New Zealand act­or Sam Neill. Shortly after the news broke on Monday, RNZ asked me to write an appre­ci­ation of some of Sam’s films and I came up with Sir Sam Neill: A life in ten per­form­ances.

If you want to take a look at the video that I men­tion in the art­icle, here it is.

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1. A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies (Simon & Schuster) ↩︎
2. That scene does­n’t look very much like Australia and turns out to have been shot in the Pacific North West ↩︎