Waves: The Indie Movie You’re Sure to Love if You Don’t Pay Attention to Plot
I went into 2019’s much-celebrated A24 drama Waves knowing this: the trailer was visually stunning, as was director Trey Edward Schults’ 2017 psychological thriller It Comes At Night — featuring Kelvin Harrison, Jr. — and it had something to do with drug addiction. Clocking in at 135 minutes, it felt about 40–50 too long.
Waves opens with a cool shot, of the platinum blonde, popular big man on campus Tyler Williams (Harrison) and his beautiful girlfriend Alexis playfully pushing each other and kissing while he drives across a bridge to or from Miami. The long take is from a constantly spinning camera, and there’s no one in the back seats of the car. That shots seems a good metaphor for the movie: tense and often visually impressive, but with a lot of wasted space.
I lied. The film actually opens with a girl on a bike, no helmet, on a quiet, idyllic road. She gradually stands on the pegs and gives in to the beautiful wind, hands outstretched like a yogi, at peace. She is Tyler’s sister Emily (Taylor Russell), who will become the main character about halfway through the movie. THEN we meet Tyler and his girlfriend, in the car scene.
We see some beautiful, artsy shots of Tyler and Alexis swimming and passionately kissing. Schults’ command of lighting makes you want to stay in this world of Nicholas Winding Refn-esq reflective blues, reds and yellows.
Tyler, an accomplished wrestler, is taking “safe” pain meds for a sore shoulder, but we soon learn his father Ronald (Sterling K. Brown) has Oxycodones for a chronic knee problem (which, I’m pretty sure doctors don’t prescribe Oxycodones for). Tyler’s biological mother died of a drug overdose, something at least one character would’ve been mindful of during the first half of the movie, but isn’t.
Tyler wants to wrestle through the injury, so he steals his dad’s pills. That’s when shit goes wrong, and leads to him being removed almost entirely from the last half of the movie, and the transition to Emily, who doesn’t have friends or anyone to talk to in school — not because people are freezing her out because of her brother’s actions — but because they don’t seem to notice her, like Laney Boggs. Tally this among the things in the movie that seemed a little impractical. People would definitely notice her, because we know (from a montage of Instagram comments) people are talking about her brother and what he did.
She is courted by Luke (Lucas Hedges) and within two scenes they are road tripping together, having sex and doing drugs in visually intoxicating montages that don’t really allow us to understand the core of who either person is, just that they’re young. The montages are tense, and intentionally reminiscent of Tyler and Alexis’.
There’s a 30 minute story arc where Luke reconciles with his estranged, abusive dying father. It’s melodramatic, drawn out and just plain bad.
The friend I saw this movie with agreed that the boyfriend character was probably initially written to be in four or so scenes, but when Mr. A24 himself Lucas Hedges became attached, the character became overwritten.
The movie is about guilt, and the elusiveness of forgiveness, topics more than worthy of dissection — but we don’t really get to explore them except through furtive glances and montages. An element I’d have liked to explored further is Ronald’s guilt. Speaking about Tyler, the step-mother tells Ronald “you pushed him too hard,” which is obvious to the viewer (but in a good way, not super over-the-top). He often wakes a hungover Tyler at dawn for workouts, and speaks sternly to him.
He’s stronger than Tyler, and after we learn of Tyler’s shoulder injury, we see the pain that trying to lift weights with Ronald is causing Tyler.
In the last hour of the film, Ronald takes Emily fishing, where he admits to being more invested in Tyler’s life than hers, a nice and necessary scene that makes several directly before and after it feel even more fickle.
Plenty of movies succeed by making their supporting actors the most compelling, but Ronald is the only one who feels fleshed out by the end of the film.
On a drama scale, almost every little detail of this movie was a 12 out of 10, which is no way to write a script. Tyler’s shoulder injury is declared the worst the doctor has ever seen before (not only will Tyler never wrestle again, he may never be able to lift weights or fully raise his arms again…c’mon!)
A lot of critics loved the spinning camera shot that introduces us to Tyler and Alexis. I liked it too, but we see it again, at least twice on Emily and Luke driving, and it loses its allure pretty fast. It’s certainly no Goodfellas Copa shot.
Like the spinning camera in a moving car gimmick, we see each couple exuberantly climb halfway out the windows of moving cars, in a joyous celebration of youth. It’s not an offensively wasteful shot, but each time it falls emotionally flat, because it doesn’t reflect any deeper strife or growth the character is experiencing (compare this with Queen and Slim, where the same act of leaning out a moving car carries tremendous weight, and afterward seems an essential part of the characters’ development.)
Waves closes with the same shot which opened the film, Emily on her bike, free. But it’s not clear whether that shot was from before of after the film’s main event, and we’re not sure where she’s headed — emotionally speaking — at her story’s conclusion, so it’s just another visual time-filler overcompensating for a script that lacks direction.