Breaking the waves
Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants finds spirituality in the surf.

By Susan Gerhard

WITH SOLAR BLOND hair and bronzed quads to match, the world's greatest big-wave surfer, Laird Hamilton, stands on an ocean-framed precipice, looking out at infinity. It's a signature moment of Stacy Peralta's Riding Giants – a film that darkens the happy cannabis cloud of the surf-film genre – because even as the camera shoots an endless summer vista, it indicates trouble's on the horizon. And Hamilton is in the crosshairs, his Greek-god body just statuary at this particular point in time, frozen and ready to shatter. The crisis at hand isn't the traditional surf-induced spinal injury. It's not war or plague or even heartbreak. It's bad weather. Or, actually, good weather, by most standards. The ocean is at peace, meaning: there are no waves.

In the grammar of Peralta's Riding Giants, a documentary that replaces the party-boy tone of so many extreme-sports movies with utter, earnest seriousness and a massive amount of historical footage, the situation is equivalent to gazing on a nuclear winter. It's, of course, too terrible a thing to speak of directly. So Peralta has Hamilton's wife, Gabrielle Reece, a pro-volleyball player and model, put it gently. "When the ocean is not making some of the waves available," she says haltingly, "Laird suffers."

Explained another way, by Hamilton himself, who seems distracted, as if he's minutes away from his own personal meeting with Poseidon to straighten the situation out, "It's like if you were a dragon slayer and there were no more dragons."

It's a lack of imagination on my part, I realize, that I can't quite picture it without some help. But Riding Giants supplies the dragons, the dragon-slayers, the play-by-play commentators, as well as the poets, to give us a reason why big-wave surfers face a very public death nearly every day over a very private trip. The answer – pat as it may seem – is actually earned by the end of this film, which spans a couple generations of surfers, from southern Californians who migrated to Hawaii, to the frigid-water frontier surfers of Half Moon Bay's Maverick's to the superstud tow-in surfers of the moment. Apparently, facing death, with all the adrenaline that accompanies it, clarifies what it means to live.

Performance enhancements being a theme of the times, maybe it's no surprise how many other movies have taken advantage of various combinations of testosterone and adrenaline, whether through the virtual steroid of a relentless soundtrack (Trainspotting, Pi), beyond-the-pale stunts (from Jackass to the lifework of Vin Diesel), or the whiff of snuff (the IMAX documentation of death by mountain climbing, alongside Jon Krakauer, in Everest). As Riding Giants travels from one wave to the next, at higher altitudes, colder temperatures, and crazier speeds, the climaxes multiply almost to the point of tedium. Surfers die famously (Mark Foo tragically and mysteriously succumbed at Maverick's) and almost die just as famously (the Greg Noll tsunami ride is a story that's lasted decades).

But Peralta understands when and how to put on the breaks. After translating his skills as a Zephyr team pro-skater into action-sports filmmaking, Peralta surprised audiences by making a skate film, Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), that turned more on storytelling than tricks – despite its stylish quick-cut veneer. This time he ups the ante in a genre that doesn't often get past "whoa." The story line travels through three generations of big-wave surfers, opening with a nod to surfing's Polynesian roots before setting forth the boho surfers of the '40s as proto-beats, living off the land, the rush, and simply achieved nirvanas. The film then hones in on Noll, whose '50s and '60s rides were feats and pranks, stylish and daring and kind of dumb all at the same time. Peralta takes it to black and white as he moves to scary northern California, where lone woodsman Jeff Clark has been surfing even bigger waves in Maverick's all by himself ("It's as if you discovered Mt. Everest behind Mt. Whitney," he says), before getting to the life-affirming-by-way-of-death-defying theme elucidated in the brow of the biggest big-wave surfer of them all, Hamilton.

For all the drama created, it's hard not to wonder if it was really necessary. Surf movies, no matter how superficial, seem to have no problem drawing fans. Maybe that's been the problem – they don't even have to try. One of the greatest insults to the legacy, in Peralta's view, is the Hollywoodization of surf through Gidget and friends and its subsequent reduction into extreme-sports pornography through movies that skip from wave to wave without context. Peralta bends the stick in the other direction, re-creating an extreme scene as a spiritual one. It's cute and comical when the film recounts how young Laird got his last name – he met a cool surfer on the beach, the famed Bill Hamilton, and brought him home to meet his then-single mom. Bill married into the family, and – eerily, maybe prophetically – a star was born. Peralta believes Laird Hamilton has a message to deliver to the world, and he's not afraid to let Riding Giants become more than just a surf movie to carry it.

'Riding Giants' opens Fri/16 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.