Film Society x The Student: “Point Break”

I anxiously await the day when The New Yorker will broaden its definition of “Arts and Culture” to include reviews of demolition derbies and skate edits. This is to say that the aesthetic palette of the intellectual elite could be refreshed with the occasional journey below the well-wrought and charmingly subtle new media topping bestseller lists and premiering at independent theaters and down towards the pulsing underbelly of money-making slop.

This is not to diss demolition derbies and skate edits. I’ve been an avid fan of each literary genre since I could throw toy cars at the wall and ventriloquize my greasy fingers toward kickflipping a tech deck. I only mean to point out that while reviews of films like “Chungking Express” and “Phantasm” offer a distinct critical approach, there is an entirely different method to analyzing the derby or a movie like “Point Break” (1991). For a discussion about the mise-en-scène of the flick, I might refer you to a film grad student with too much time on their hands, but for the critique that approaches the essence of the bank-robbing, wave-surfing, sky-diving, FBI-chasing, football-playing, love-making masterpiece,  I’ll anxiously wait as the same five year old whose fingers struggled to ollie his tech-deck over a McDonald’s french fry emerges from his jaded, liberal-arts-educated shell to quietly whisper the only expression he knows: “Awesome.”

“Point Break,” directed by Kathryn Bigelow, follows rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) (I could stop at the name to convince you of this movie’s merit). He’s a former all-American quarterback for the Ohio State Buckeyes that led his team to the Rose Bowl only to sustain a hit that saw his knee “fold back 90 degrees in the wrong direction.” After his injury, Utah used his quarterback intuition to graduate top of his class at Harvard Law just to enroll at Quantico and get to the top of his class again. We meet him in the pouring rain at the shooting range, chewing his gum, ducking and weaving as he shotguns targets with lethal precision.

Utah’s a bit cocky now; his new boss in the bank robbery division of the FBI describes him as “an old blue flame special: young dumb and full of come.” We can feel his recalcitrance from the moment that the boss-man explains that bank robbers are caught “by crunching data, good crime-scene work, good lab work, and, most importantly, good data-based analysis.”  Utah’s clean suit and slicked-back hair aren’t fooling anyone: this clearly isn’t his environment.

Utah’s dramatic foil is Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), short for “Bodhisattva” — again, what a name. He’s the spiritual leader of the city’s surfing underbelly, catching the daily systolic and diastolic pulsation of the tide. He seeks the ultimate ride and its implied one-way ticket to transcendence beyond this corporeal plane. He’s smooth, confident, intent on his spiritual quest, loved by all of his similarly sun-kissed bros/disciples, and full of irresistible koan-adjacent aphorisms (e.g., “Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation causes your worst fears to come true”).

To finance his surfing religion, Bodhi and the gang rob banks through the summer. They don the masks of Presidents Carter, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan to fleece financial institutions of all the money in the cash drawers. The operations of these “Ex-Presidents,” as they’re called, are precise: Nobody ever gets shot, and they never go to the vault because, as Utah explains, “You burn time in the vault.”

The Ex-Presidents are in it for just enough; the money is merely a means to a more radical end than is traditionally offered by industrial society. This gives their operation a quietly political dimension. As Bodhi says, “This was never about money for us. It was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human spirit is still alive.”

It’s a seductive ideology, and Swayze delivers these lines of wisdom with his charm dialed to eleven. While we might laugh at Keanu's “brah”-ness in his interpretation of Utah, Swayze keeps Bodhi largely out of the comedic limelight. After Bodhi rattles off another aphorism that ends up being the thesis of the entire movie (“If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to pay the ultimate price”), the guy sitting next to me in the theater yelled that he would “follow this guy anywhere” (Q.E.D.).

At the scene of Bodhi’s latest heist, Utah and his over-the-hill partner (Gary Busey) find two clues that the rest of the department won’t take seriously: board wax and a tan line on the security tape. They realize that these expertly calculated operations are not the machinations of a highly trained organization of criminal masterminds but of surfers.

Now we have a movie: Utah must go undercover in the surfing world. “Learn the moves, get into their head, pick up the speech” and find out which gang of surfers is robbing the good people of Los Angeles/the oppressive financial structure of capitalism (depending whose side you’re on).

Utah’s narrative arc is simple but steeped in literary tradition going back to “Henry IV.” Whereas Prince Hal is torn between his official duties to his father, King of England, and the poetic brilliance of Falstaff, king of the tavern, Utah is torn between the FBI’s legally inscribed mission and Bodhi’s adrenaline-fueled philosophy. Utah must resist the thrills of football by truck-light, skydiving in formation with your best friends, unprotected sex on the beach a là DJ Assault, and surfing LA’s point break: “the ultimate ride.” In short, he must resist living as he’s always wanted to live. This struggle to inhabit both worlds is Shakespearean lit with all the oranges and yellows of a sunset refracted on a cresting swell. It’s impossible for Utah to live two lives. As one of Bodhi’s groupies wisely puts it: “Lawyers don’t surf.”

Literary heritage aside, this is an action movie, and the action is at its core. Some highlights include a white-knuckle-inducing cut of Utah’s head struggling to free itself from the hands of a coked-up surfer pushing him into the gaping mechanical maw of a lawnmower’s spinning blades, an extended skydiving scene that’s described in the film as “sex with gods,” an urban chase scene filmed from the ground largely in the first person (which this reviewer ranks as the third best chase scene ever after “The French Connection” and “The Wrong Trousers,” the Wallace and Gromit flick), and countless shots demonstrating the power of the ocean and the finesse required from the surfer to feel its rhythms.

Bad action movies plot out their action sequences then fill in the gaps with a supplementary plot. Good action movies like “Point Break” begin with a strong narrative that implies action sequences. We coast down the barrel of the plot’s wave and emerge unscathed just before it crashes behind us with a resounding “fin.”

Driving these flourishes of adrenaline-pumping action is a love story: A three-person waltz between Bodhi, Utah, and Utah’s girlfriend, Tyler (Lori Petty). Once Bodhi uncovers Utah’s FBI identity, he manipulates Utah’s love for his girlfriend and Bodhi for violent, self-serving ends. Such a turn forces us to doubt the legitimacy of Bodhi’s claims to radical-ness, and they also point to a latent romance between the two men. Perhaps the film’s hesitancy to lean further into the homoerotic implications of Bodhi and Utah’s chemistry is a weakness; this reviewer can admit that much.

Whereas a less intelligent action flick would end with Utah and Tyler in each other’s arms and free from Bodhi’s manipulation by sexual fianchetto, “Point Break” elevates beyond the formula of its genre in the finale. As Utah and Tyler kiss each other in relief, the same guy sitting next to me giggles to himself and says, “They could’ve ended it there, but they gave us more.”

The final showdown pits Bodhi against Utah on the beach in Australia in the middle of a “50 year storm” that turns waves deadly. Utah’s hair is grown out and he admits to surfing every day because of Bodhi. Bodhi hasn’t changed a bit; he says he’s simply “waiting for my set.” This reviewer will not spoil the film’s ending so that the reader might feel compelled to watch it on their own (This is, of course, the whole point of this review: Watch this movie if only to see Keanu and Swayze at the prime of their lives wrestling each other in skin-tight wetsuits).

In this final confrontation between the two men, enamored with one another but divided by their inability to escape their first principles, the movie casts a complex picture of contrary ideologies. It leads us to ask questions that this reviewer finds to be fundamentally important, including the question of whether one ever consciously decides how to live one’s life.

Just as “Henry IV” presents the condition of growing up such that we may better understand our own maturation, “Point Break” gives us a complex picture of self-doubt and transformation bundled in a warm and funny package of wit and spectacle. If we laugh at Keanu’s character when he screams something like “Why can’t I ever say what I really mean?!”, then Keanu has done his job. When you’re forced to rearticulate your beliefs to yourself in the face of an alien way of life, you will sound as “young, dumb,” and potentially “full of come” as Johnny Utah.

“Point Break” offers a complicated picture of what it looks like to reform your entire life around a new set of first principles while simultaneously appealing to the tech deck-flipping child within you and me. It’s got layers that make it equally fit for ages eight and up, like a LEGO set in motion.