Ridiculous Opinions #269
Opining the joy derived from the film Point Break...
Let’s talk about charisma on film a bit more.
Last week, we sat down and watched the 1991 classic, Point Break, starring the inimitable Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze. Point Break tells the story of Keanu Reeves’ character named Johnny Utah. I’m not sure that one could come up with a better name than Johnny Utah. Anyway, Mr. Utah goes undercover to investigate a group of bank robbers known as the "Ex-Presidents", who wear masks of former U.S. presidents during their heists. He infiltrates a surfing community and becomes close friends with Patrick Swayze’s character, Bodhi, the charismatic leader of the gang, who turns out to be the mastermind behind the robberies. As Utah gets drawn into the adrenaline-fueled world of surfing and criminal activities, he struggles with his growing admiration for Bodhi and his duty to bring him to justice, leading to a climactic confrontation that tests their complex relationship.
Now, Point Break is not a good movie. Simultaneously, Point Break is the most wonderful film that one could ever watch and there are many reasons for this. Two of them are Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze.
Keanu Reeves is one of the most enigmatic actors that one could ever see on screen in the history of cinema, and he embodies everything that I refer to when it comes to charisma with actors. When it comes down to it, Keanu isn’t that talented of an actor.
I am not the first person to say that Mr. Reeves’ performances aren’t the world’s greatest acting. But criticizing those performances are like shooting fish in a barrel. There are all kinds of things that we could harp on with Keanu.
And yet…Keanu Reeves is still a movie star. Why is this? What is it about this man that has kept the moviegoing public coming back to him year in and year out for well over thirty years?
The answer is charisma.
There is something extraordinarily odd about Keanu Reeves. For me, it’s because, despite his bad acting, I believe in him with every single performance that he does. It doesn’t matter that he delivers lines in the most clunky way possible…
…there is not a moment in that scene that I don’t believe him.
He really is going to learn jujitsu. I believe him.
But why? Why are we compelled to watch certain actors and not others? It’s very hard to articulate. I know, in my heart, that Point Break is a bad movie, but I sat through the whole damned thing last night. I was compelled to watch every last bit of it because Keanu was so awesome in it. I believed he was Johnny Utah and I believed that he was morally conflicted in arresting his bank-robbing, surfer friends.
Some people just have it. Keanu is one of them. It could be his good looks, or it could be that he is just this odd human being upon which we can imprint ourselves. I quote the line from Austin Powers, “Women want him and men want to be him.” This is the mystery that is charisma in both real life and in movies. Let me give you an example of why Keanu is just oozing gravitas. In the following clip, Keanu says nothing. He doesn’t even act. He just runs around, firing a gun like a badass.
What the hell? Why was this so compelling? I don’t have the answer, but let me ask you a question: Would you watch Timothee Chalemet do that? No. You wouldn’t. But you would watch Keanu. And this man is sixty-years old!
I keep trying to think of ways to articulate why Keanu is compelling, but I can’t. We just want to watch him. There is no other explanation.
This brings us around to the other star of the movie, the late, great Patrick Swayze. Swayze has never been the world’s greatest actor, but he most certainly had that quality that is so lacking in most stars today. Whenever you watched Patrick Swayze on screen, you were mesmerized.
For me, whenever Swayze was in a movie, it was like I was watching a big brother. That’s what he always embodied to me. It goes all the way back to the Reagan-era classic, “Red Dawn”.
That was, of course, his role in the film, and perhaps, from a psychological perspective, that’s the role he always took with him because I watched this at such a young age (you can ask my mother why I was watching this disturbing film at the age of 12). Here’s a scene from Red Dawn that I loved:
Oh, wait, I’m sorry…that has nothing to do with the subject of this newsletter. I just love the utter and complete serious with which Harry Dean Stanton delivered this classic line of modern, American cinema.
But back to Patrick Swayze. Whether you liked him or not, you couldn’t deny that there was something compelling about Swayze. Whether it was Dirty Dancing…
Oh, I’m sorry…I got the wrong clip there. But you can’t deny that Swayze was compelling in that scene. Let me play the REAL version:
Oh, geez, I did it again! Sorry! I’m trying to make a compelling argument for why Patrick Swayze is awesome. How about this classic from the film, Roadhouse? Wait for the line…
Seriously! He delivered that line with the panache and joie de vivre of a classic movie star! That smirk! That mullet! Ye gods! I want to watch him all day! Or we could look at another clip from this film. Listen to this monologue:
I mean, this is a film about a bouncer who has come to clean up a bar! This movie was remade with Jake Gyllenhal in Patrick Swayze’s role recently. Here’s an example from that movie:
Are you compelled to watch Gyllenhal like you were Swayze? You could do a bit of pretzel-logic to try to say yes, but Swayze didn’t need visual effects or sped-up cameras to do a fight scene. He did it the old fashioned way!
Now that’s a fight scene! But Swayze had other facets to his talent. Check out the fine acting from this scene from 1989 Best Picture winner, Ghost:
Oh, I’m kidding. He was bad in that. I hated that movie. When I was in high school, I was the projectionist at our local movie theater and we played Ghost for almost six weeks, which meant that I got to watch parts of that film six nights a week for that amount of time. I did not enjoy it.
The bottom line is that Swayze had charisma, which he brought in spades to the role of Bodhi in Point Break. Check out this Zen monologue:
Now, there is absolutely no difference from Swayze as Dalton in Roadhouse and Swayze as Bodhi in Point Break. But we don’t mind, because he’s Patrick Swayze! We LOVE him. His movies were bad. His acting was poor. But none of that mattered! He was Patrick!
And when you paired Swayze and Keanu in a movie like Point Break, you were capturing lightning in a bottle. Plus, you had the awesomeness of Kathryn Bigelow directing the film…you couldn’t go wrong. It was charisma overload!
The remade Point Break recently. Do you remember it? No, you don’t. I don’t even know who starred in it!
And that is why, after 30+ years, I sat down and watched the entirety of Point Break, even though there were plenty of other movies to watch. That is why movies today are not the same as movies from the past. Somewhere along the line, charisma has disappeared, and the only way to find it again is to stop casting in Hollywood.
But that’s a tale for another newsletter…I don’t want to give them all its solutions just yet. Those solutions must be earned!
See you next newsletter!
Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments…
