Surfing story is cast a-Drift by lack of plot

FILM

Drift

Reviewer: Mark Naglazas

The story of how the surf industry rose from the beaches of Australia in the late 1960s and early 70s to swamp the world is fascinating, the unlikely tale of those who dropped out to follow their bliss transforming the society they rejected.

Unquestionably, writer and codirector Morgan O’Neill (with Ben Nott) have captured the wild beauty of our stunning South West beaches and nailed some of the best big-wave action you will ever see outside of a surf documentary.

See it on a mega-screen and you’ll wish you were wearing one of the wetsuits made by the film’s heroes (or, more precisely, their nimble-fingered mum).

However, when the narrative moves to dry land it is a wipe-out, a pallid, earnest, emotionally flat collection of bits of Home and Away-ish dramatic business that fails to recreate the sexy, grungy, free-wheeling beach culture that made the emergence of empires so wonderfully improbable.

Drift is simply not as fun as it should be.

Instead of immersing us in the world beautifully evoked by Bombora, the directing duo (who also wrote the script) get sidetracked with a series of generic, uninteresting subplots and characters such as the Kellys’ struggle to keep their mother’s home out of the clutches of a nasty banker and the malign influence of the local drug kingpin.

There’s potential in the strained relationship between the hard-working, responsible older brother Andy (Myles Pollard) and the younger Jimmy (Xavier Samuel), a surfing hot shot who early on in Drift falls in with Steve Bastoni’s leather-clad bikie Miller (hard to imagine how, as Bastoni is the most amusingly non-threatening gang leader in memory).

Sam Worthington makes the most of limited screen time, but his character is one of the film’s several wasted opportunities.

Instead of embodying the spirit of the era, he’s used like a utility player in the AFL, brought off the bench to fill a variety of roles without ever establishing himself as a coherent or interesting character.

By the end, we have no idea what he represents.

We get a glimpse of what Worthington might have contributed to Drift in the film’s best and only genuinely poetic scene when JB gazes out at a solitary surfer on a lonely beach and quips that he cares about nothing else but being on that wave in that moment.

If only the rest of this rather square, pretty but too freshly scrubbed-looking movie had more of these reflexive, questioning moments and less of the forced Hollywood uplift, it might have caught a wave that brought it home.