There can’t be many families like the Paskowitz clan, the subject of the new documentary “Surfwise.” Or maybe you know another 11-member family that lived in a 24-foot trailer together, roamed around the country, and opened a surfing school.
Doug Pray’s entertaining movie introduces us to this group, tracing their history and their quarrels with equal-handed casualness. The key to the Paskowitz organism is the patriarch, Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, a man who became a physician, married and divorced two women, and introduced surfing to Israel — all before embarking on the movie’s main subject.
Feeling boxed in by the conventional life of the 1950s, Doc married the very patient (and fertile) Juliette, and they had eight sons and one seemingly overwhelmed daughter. The kids never went to school; the family just kept moving around from one surfing mecca to another.
About half the movie shows how liberating and fun this was; the other half hints at the downside. Most of the kids were unprepared for life in the grown-up world, and Doc’s strict authority was hard to shake. The boys, some of whom became champion surfers, were in fierce competition with each other.
The movie mentions, but doesn’t quite delve into, the weirdness of being in the same trailer while your parents are having sex. Every night. The Paskowitz kids are clear about their unhappiness about that.
But for the stubborn Doc Paskowitz, it was all a part of his philosophy, which seems to have been equal parts good eating, good surfing and good sex with his wife.
There are family issues to sew together before the end of the movie. But these are resolved, which makes me wonder how much the making of the movie had to do with getting people together again.
Pray has a lot of people to keep straight, and thankfully he numbers the children in their on-screen IDs. They are a mostly engaging bunch — plus, there are frequent cutaways to surfers gliding down waves, always a sure bet in a movie. By the end, you’ll be glad you learned about the Paskowitz life, and probably glad you didn’t live it.
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