Swell is a 2019 drama about a young woman who embarks on a road trip to find her younger brother at the request of her dying grandfather.
While surfing does play a part in writer/director Justin Lee‘s latest drama Swell, it’s hardly what it’s about, though few sports movies are truly about the sport they show off. Instead, they become more symbolic, representing the greater challenges of our story’s hero. No duh, right? Here though, surfing is mostly in the periphery, this much more a road trip than a wave rider that features a few strong performances and an uplifting message.
Tess (Summer Spiro) is thirty now, a California surfer girl from a troubled past who is still sort of looking for herself. She’s bright and curious, at home on the sea, riding waves and getting all one with nature. She’s now closest with her grandfather (Corbin Bernsen), though he’s in the hospital and on the bad side of worse news. He’s dying and so he decides it’s time for Tess to get on with her life and reconnect with her younger brother, long separated as children. Reluctant at first, she takes to the road, bringing her best friend Vera (Gabrielle Stone), a somewhat cynical woman (with her own set of burdens) along for the adventure. They travel north, to big surfing country, picking up a young man named Noah (Brennan Murray), who wears a dinosaur costume and is hitching a ride to where he thinks others like him live, and Ono (Kuali’i Wittman), a kind surfer, who grows fond of Tess.
Aimed squarely at the family audience, Swell is an innocuous little film with a simple but affecting message, ringing all the emotions in can out its A-to-B story. It doesn’t take much to make the connections it intends to lead us to, though it’s not trying to be all that complicated. This is a tale of redemption and coming out from behind one’s shadows.
Most peculiar though is Noah, who is clearly in need of serious medical attention, or at least ’round the clock supervision, so out of sorts it’s a wonder he’s out in the world on his own at all. Choosing to ignore this and simply let what he is exist for the sake of the story (he speed talks non-stop in a high pitched yelp while clutching a plastic dino, believing he is one himself) is a test to be sure, but in the end, perhaps necessary. Either way, Murray’s performance is a distraction, choosing hyper over subtlety, which strips away some of the impact.
While Noah is decidedly hard to watch, everything else orbiting Tess is handled far better, with Spiro a fine young actress possessing a very natural presence. She might not get much time on the water as the title and posters might promise, but is nonetheless very convincing as a young woman dealing with some truly painful haunts. Equally good are Stone and Wittman, who seem superfluous at the start but grow into far more weighted corners of the story as the third act develops.
You won’t for a second not know where Swell is going, the road it’s on straight and narrow, though that doesn’t deny it some quality moments. Surely it glosses over a few things that in the real world might not so easily be solved, but for the purpose of getting us to its end, manages to find its footing more often than not.