Hanging 10 for 20 years
‘Surfwise’ a powerful documentary of transient wave-seeking family
‘Surfwise’
Director: Doug Pray
Genre: Documentary
Rating: R
Grade: 4 Globes
REVIEW. If surfing must have a first family, it would make sense for that family to be a bit different from the average nuclear unit. Though the sport is now as American as cable TV and human growth hormone, it has counterculture roots. And Dr. Dorian Paskowitz was there at the beginning. He hung with surfing pioneer Woody Brown in Hawaii and brought the sport to the beach scene in Tel Aviv. Then, after two failed marriages, he packed his third wife and his children into a 24-foot RV and kept them there for more than two decades, traveling the U.S. to surf with his family. For the Paskowitz children, all nine of them, two rules were most strongly enforced: You will not go to school. You will surf every day.
“Surfwise” is neither an overly sympathetic nor an overly harsh portrait of the Paskowitz family. It couples interviews with the now grown children and their aged parents with a wealth of stock footage. (The Paskowitz family may have been living off the grid, but they were big enough celebrities in the surfing community to attract the occasional television crew.) The picture we get of Dorian is of a man made of contradictions: educated (his medical degree was from Stanford) but intent on denying his kids any schooling; successful (he was once president of the Hawaii chapter of the American Medical Association) but so contemptuous of money that he once gave away a $40,000 inheritance for fear that it would ruin the perfect poverty he struggled so hard to maintain. Consequently, his kids wound up conflicted. They profess admiration for their father at one moment, then curse him in another. Each has struggled in adult life to adapt to the world they were sequestered from as children.
Director Doug Pray demonstrates wise patience as he waits to show us the fates of the Paskowitz kids. Only once we have a good working knowledge of their lifestyle as children are we shown that most of them in adulthood flirted with success before meeting failure — and in some cases turning on each other. “Surfwise” isn’t a documentary of great social import, but neither is it frivolous. Nothing this well made could ever be called frivolous.