No matter how many times you hear the story of Bethany Hamilton, the U.S. professional surfing champion whose left arm got bitten off by a tiger shark when she was 13, it exerts an emotional power …
No matter how many times you hear the story of Bethany Hamilton, the U.S. professional surfing champion whose left arm got bitten off by a tiger shark when she was 13, it exerts an emotional power that can’t be denied. At this point, however, the story is so familiar that it has taken on the quality of a larger-than-life American parable of tragedy and faith and perseverance and triumph.
The story of how she lost her arm, and recovered, has always been such an awesome lesson in facing down adversity that the film’s director and cinematographer, Aaron Lieber, doesn’t even try to find an original angle on it; and maybe there isn’t one. We see news flashbacks to Oct. 31, 2003, the day that Hamilton was attacked by a tiger shark off the coast of Kauai. We see a shot of her junior surfboard being held up with a clean shark bite out of the middle of it.
We see footage of Bethany in the hospital, shortly after the calamity, and beneath her dazed demeanor she has the grace to say, “I’m glad it was me and no one else out there” — by which she means her surfing bestie Alana Blanchard. “I’d just rather have it be me than Alana,” she says, “because I love her so much.” That’s a profound thought for a teenager to offer from her recovery bed, because what it expresses is that Bethany Hamilton loved something more than herself.
It was assumed that her surfing career was over, but within days she voiced concrete hopes of surfing again with one arm. We see a TV interviewer ask, “Do you think you’re going to surf again?” “II’m going to surf again.” She was back on her board four weeks later. Since she wasn’t able to duck dive to get out to the big waves, her father installed a special handle on her surfboard that enabled her to duck dive.
All of this takes up the first 45 minutes of “Unstoppable.” And then? Then the film shifts to the adult Bethany, her cataclysm far behind her, as she competes for the world title in 2015, just four months after her son, Tobias, was born. As a new mother, she says that for a while she tried but failed to devote herself to surfing as consumingly as it demanded. Yet nothing deters Bethany, and nothing deters “Unstoppable” from returning to its shiny narrative of triumph.
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