I’m pretty sure that I took more notes on Surfwise than I have for any of the films I’ve reviewed for Past the Popcorn… and that’s a number now mounting into the hundreds. I also found myself very moved by the film, which is quite surprising—it’s tough to become emotionally involved in a film while dividing your attention between pen and paper and the screen.

First off, this documentary is packed full of pithy, aphoristic quotes. The subjects of the film are Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, his wife, and their nine children… all of whom he loaded into a 24-foot camper—not merely for a week or two, but for the entirety of child-rearing—deliberately opting for a life on the road, ready to meet the next great wave. The siblings never went to school; “If you don’t go into the system,” observes their mother, Juliette, “they don’t even know you exist.” Subsequently, they lacked any formal education; rather, they lived a regimentedly freestyle Spartan existence, dominated by Doc’s definition of health: “the possession of a superior state of well-being.”

Well-being, for Doc the father, had nothing to do with conventional living. He’d twice been previously married, had at one time been considered a viable candidate for the governorship of Hawaii, and was a Stanford-educated physician. But being at “the peak” of his mental and physical powers in the midst of worldly success was, for him, “the lowest point” of his life, an existence that amounted (as one friend put it) to little more than storing up acorns. Doc awoke daily to the kind of panic spells in which “you hope you’ll die”… but you don’t. The only release he found was in surfing, which allowed him to “come back out of the water a warrior.”

So he chucked it all and hit the road—and the beaches. Before long, he met Juliette, and it was, as they tell the story, love at first sight. Their first home was a car parked at the beach. She was pregnant with their first child, David, by the time they were married. Not long after, they moved into the first of several pickup-mounted campers… and they pretty much stayed there.

Surfwise tells Doc’s story in three acts. The first is the nuts-and-bolts exposition of the Paskowitz family—the convention-defying life they have lived, with a good measure of foreshadowing of future trouble in paradise. The film opens, for instance, with David’s observation: “When we had nothing, we were in complete cultist bliss… When we started to want something, that’s when it hit the fan.” His brother Moses observes that the kids were raised in a way that qualified them for only three vocations: being “a surfer, a bum, or a rock star.” Another brother, Adam, acknowledged that they were reared “to be unchained.” Naturally, that’s an awful lot of liberty and freedom for kids to handle; still, director Doug Pray gets us to see how Doc’s idealism could also be seen as an idyll. For anyone who’s ever spent much time in the corporate grind, the film’s first act leaves us pretty sympathetic to Doc’s oddball family project.

The second act introduces us to the two wild-cards in the equation, though: Doc’s strong-arm, authoritarian tactics (enforced by David, who saw himself in the early years as Doc’s avenging angel) and the inevitability of teenaged rebellion. David rightly observes that with such iconoclastic pursuits, “there’s no halfway.” And when the real world starts coming to call—in the form of a successful surfing school and lucrative commercial endorsements for the surf trophy-winning Paskowitz kids—it’s a tough transition from being “not attached to the physical world at all” to developing a real taste for money. For the second-eldest, Jonathan, it began to feel like he’d been “brainwashed.” And when David the enforcer found his hands around his brother’s throat at Doc’s urging, even he started down the road toward alienation. At one point, David sings bitterly and tearfully into the camera, accompanying his own song written to his father: “Another soul in disaster.”

The third act brings a measure of healing to the natural divisions that seem to always stem from the fissures of broken utopias. Regardless of Doc’s and Juliette’s faults in raising the children—such as their insistence on having enthusiastic and uninhibited sex each night within the confines of that 24-foot camper—there’s obviously some sense in Doc’s observation that “it is easier to die when you have lived” (a sentiment, you might recall, preached by Mel Gibson in Braveheart). It’s also some consolation that, while Doc doesn’t seem to have grown inhibited in his old age, he’s wise enough to have learned that “a real man is capable of controlling himself” as a prerequisite for attempting to control his children.

The lessons that the Paskowitz clan learn are also extensible to any community that’s somewhat separatist or “cultish,” as David described it. There are benefits to being “called out”… and there are dangers. Idealism doesn’t prepare you to live in the real world, and there are only so many walls you can hide behind, and for only so long.

There’s much in this film that’s worth not spoiling, so I’ll merely observe that, when it comes to how this film affected me emotionally, there’s no mistaking that Doc and Juliette raised some remarkably creative and sensitive (if troubled) souls. I’d love to spend more time getting to know any of their nine children. It would be easy to single out David or the lone sister, Navah—but it would be unfair to do that. They are all brilliant and attractive in their own ways.

Doc, I think, would drive me crazy, though. Wouldn’t any prophet?

Surfwise is rated R for “language and some sexual material.” Frankly, the language is the sexual material. Doc talks about sex like it were breathing or eating. It’s what you might call “frank talk” in blunt language. The best way to view it, if you’re squeamish about such things, is to consider the Paskowitz clan as the subject of an anthropological study. You probably wouldn’t be at all offended by a National Geographic special that included such talk about sex… provided it were subtitled, and fell from the lips of an aborigine.

Courtesy of a regional publicist, Greg viewed a promotional screener of Surfwise.