Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton

The documentarian Rory Kennedy is known for making pictures about very serious topics. The titles alone tell the story: “Pandemic: Facing AIDS,” “Ghost of Abu Ghraib,” “Last Days in Vietnam.” This, pop culture semiotics observers and others might note, is fitting work for a Kennedy kid—Rory is the youngest child of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy.

It seems a little uncharacteristic that her latest movie is about a surfer. However, it’s clear from the opening montage that Laird Hamilton is not a fun, laid-back, carefree surfer. Prior movies about surfers and surfing, from “Endless Summer” and “Big Wednesday” on, do create portraits of catch-the-ultimate-wave obsessiveness, but they also have some emphasis on good times—sun, sand, girls, beer, bonfires. You don’t get any of that here. Right off the bat, Hamilton is described as an “incorrigible egomaniac” who has “created problems that will never be solved.” If you didn’t think surfing could have problems, well, this movie will tell you.

Kennedy hews to standard bio-doc style in the first hour of the movie. Hamilton’s birth in the early ‘60s—his mom having been a surfer herself—is followed by the young family’s abandonment by the biological father. Hamilton’s adoptive dad was also part of the milieu, and he notes that Laird was “one of the last children who got to live and breath while the pioneers still surfed.” With his half-brother, Laird makes trouble in school—“Disobedient? He was completely disobedient,” his sibling says—and takes to the water, insisting that it “teaches you courage, fear, respect.”

Hamilton is an interesting case for many reasons. First, he’s never been a proper “professional” surfer. In early days, he used his good looks to work as a model, as one of his closest friends in the sport did, and he didn’t have the inclination to go through the games of auditions. Same with acting. Why didn’t he surf competitively? “I don’t think I rejected competition as much as judgment,” he tells Kennedy. But the kind of surfing he ended up excelling at invited, and still invites, a ton of judgment.

Laird Hamilton does big-wave surfing. With the assistance of a jet ski, which, as one commentator says, provides access toward “waves too big and too powerful to paddle out to,” he gets far enough out to hook on to waves 70, 80, 100 feet high. The footage of him in the water is awe-inspiring, as are a number of iconic photographs of Hamilton at work.

From an early age, Hamilton was attracted to physical challenges that sometimes seem out and out stupid rather than plainly risky. He and a pal recall a time when they paddled on surfboards from Italy’s mainland to Corsica, learning the hard way the difference between 37 nautical miles (which the distance actually was) and 37 kilometers (which they thought the distance was).