Waiting for Lightning Blu-ray Review
It is indeed a Great Wall.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 23, 2013
My hometown of Portland, Oregon has achieved a certain cachet over the past few years courtesy of a burgeoning
hipster
movement and such celebrated fare as
Portlandia. But anyone who's lived for a while (and I've lived here for the majority of my life)
will tell you that Portland tends to suffer from a certain kind of inferiority complex, at least insofar as relatively major
metropolises go. Portland has always felt a certain competitive envy for its larger "sister cities" to the north (Seattle)
and south (San Francisco), concluding (rightly or wrongly) that it's the bastard stepchild of the larger west coast cities,
perhaps because it's not actually
on the coast (it's about an hour's drive west—if you drive like a madman—to
get to the Pacific Ocean from Portland). Portland has also felt left out in the celebrity sweepstakes as well. In fact,
when I first moved here decades ago, civic leaders were struggling to point with pride to
any major celebrity
who had come from Portland, usually consigning themselves to mentioning people like Jane Powell and Mel Blanc.
Things
have improved somewhat in the years, with several major musical acts (most recently The Decembrists) calling Portland
home, and a much improved scene for our rather splendid acting community courtesy of all sorts of film and television
offerings that utilize Portland as their home bases. But even
I, who consider myself something of a Portland
nerd (
not a repetitive term), had never really realized that Danny Way, the subject of the documentary
Waiting for Lightning, was born and lived the first few years of his life in the rainy climes of my city. Way is
probably best known to the public at large for having jumped the Great Wall of China on his skateboard in 2005, though
as this frequently quite interesting piece makes clear, he has had a lifetime seemingly attached to his skateboard, an
attachment that in fact helped
Danny overcome his own personal sense of inferiority.
There's an adage that you get the face you deserve by the time you're forty, but there's still a palpable sense of shock
when the documentary first interviews Way's mother, Mary. Though she's considerably past forty, the documentary
shows
some old photographs of her circa the 1970s when Danny and his elder brother Damon was born and the
transformation
this woman has undergone since her younger days is testament to a life lived
hard and, most likely, fast. Mary
is a
survivor, and in fact when she recounts an anecdote about meeting Damon and Danny's now deceased father, Ken, she
relates the Ken told her on their very first date that he had been put on this planet to teach Mary
how to
survive.
Mary's face is simply the most telling symbol of the tumultuous lifestyle that the Way children found themselves being
raised in. Ken died at a very young age while incarcerated for six months for not having paid a mere fifty bucks in child
support to his former wife, and while it's never made very clear exactly
what happened to him in jail (was it a
suicide or a murder?), the effects were obviously devastating on both Mary and her two young sons.
A series of "replacement" fathers then entered Damon and Danny's life, but it was probably the first one, their
stepfather, Tim O'Dea, who most influenced the boys' interest in skateboarding. Mary herself lauds Tim for being
"exactly" what her boys needed at that stage of their development, and the surrogate Dad, who was evidently quite
the woodworker, actually handmade skateboards for the boys. Danny, then little more than a toddler, figured out he
could more easily keep up with older brother Damon if he knelt on his skateboard and pushed himself around, chasing
after Damon. That began a lifelong love affair between Danny and this particular sport.
Mary's continued emotional problems due to the death of Ken and then the breakup of her subsequent marriage to Tim
led to her adopting a fairly risky lifestyle, and Damon is on record in
Waiting for Lightning talking about the
revolving door of violent men who passed through all of their lives in this phase. Ultimately Mary herself kind of checked
out, and Danny devoted himself more and more to skateboarding and the coterie of buddies (most of whom were
actually friends with Damon, and who were simply "tolerating" Danny's presence) to gain some sense of family. The
documentary interviews several key figures from this era, and highlights Danny's single minded determination to turn
skateboarding into his mode of egress from a dysfunctional childhood, something helped along by some felicitously
placed mentors.
The film ping pongs (no pun intended, considering the Chinese angle) back and forth between Danny's perilous
upbringing and his attempt to be the first person to jump the Great Wall of China. Anyone who followed the news
reports at the time (which were legion) is not going to have much of a sense of suspense about what ultimately
happened, but there are still some "heart in your throat" moments nonetheless, especially when simply viewing the
unbelievably high ramp that Way sailed down to make the jump. There's also some perhaps unintentionally hilarious
footage along the way, including a fantastic little official Chinese news agency report detailing the upcoming jump,
replete with an absolutely hysterical demonstration by the news anchor featuring cardboard cutouts and his equally
funny remonstration to the audience that "your mandatory support is encouraged".
While
Waiting for Lightning is to be commended for offering a "warts and all" depiction of the dysfunctional Way
family, one can't help but conclude that that very approach is meant to help
lionize Danny in a perhaps
unrealistic way. This is a kid who after all dropped out of school to pursue skateboarding, something that led to his
individual success but which should hardly be held up as a paradigm to other young kids who might have similar dreams
but
not the same drive or aptitude. There's also a certain corporate element to the film, including the participation of some
of Way's sponsors,
which calls the film's objectivity into question, at least in passing. Interestingly, that corporate element does
not
include Nike, one of the few Portland based companies that has helped this city overcome its lingering issues of not
being good enough.
