Gauging the success of “White Tide: The Legend of Culebra” probably means gauging how the film’s subject, Ronnie Hyden, responds to it. Will he dig it? Will he hate it? Will he sense that director Theo Love has honored him, if not flattered him, with his recreation of the batshit crazy events of Hyden’s recent life? Will he feel respected instead of humiliated by his portrayal in the documentary’s slim running time? Or will he realize that the film exposes him as a fool, a good-hearted, well-intended fool, but a fool nonetheless?
You can hardly blame Hyden for taking the bait and buying into a word of mouth tale about several million dollars’ worth of cocaine buried beneath the sands of Culebra, a small island settled about 17 miles off the shore of mainland Puerto Rico, or perhaps you can. The temptation of a theoretically easy but completely illegal payday that demands naught more than extraction of dangerous, unclaimed narcotics from the earth and the distribution of said narcotics among buyers in Florida, Hyden’s home, is immense, assuming you’re either the greedy type or simply hard on your luck and short on sound judgment. Hyden appears to be both; he’s a businessman who took a boot to the ass after the Great Recession and found himself bereft of funds and laid low by economic machinations beyond his control.
Thus, cocaine.
“If you knew where 2 million dollars was buried in the ground, would you dig the shit up?” asks Andy, Hyden’s friend, associate, and pot dealer, at the start of the film. “Fuck yeah I would. I did it one time,” he concludes before sauntering off camera, bedecked in a wide-brimmed hat, his eyes hidden behind aviators. Andy’s a character, literally and figuratively. Any moment featuring Andy, he’s drugged out, not quite tweaking but definitely partying; in Hyden’s bid to secure keys of coke from Culebra’s bosom, he’s an accomplice, a facilitator, and at times a hindrance. Carl Hiaasen couldn’t write a Florida area stereotype like Andy, though lord knows he’s spent his entire career coming damn close. He’s an odd duck.
Hiaasen feels like an influence on “White Tide,” which is a nonsensical thing to say about a documentary. Much as the film is rooted in actual happenings between the Sunshine State and Puerto Rico, though, Love directs it like a feature narrative; he intersperses reenactment footage of Hyden’s efforts to recover the cocaine and his wheeling and dealing on American shores with local pushers, effectively positioning Hyden as his very own Tony Montana. There’s the answer to questions about how Hyden will take “White Tide:” He’ll be ecstatic about it. “Scarface” is his favorite film of all time. Love even devotes a chunk of “White Tide” to the most over-quoted moment in “Scarface,” granting Hyden opportunity to try his hand at matching Al Pacino. “Say hello to my little friend!” he booms, smiling from ear to ear. Hyden loves the camera.
Not as much as he loves money, and even then money comes a distant second to his love of his family. You’re rolling your eyes: “I sold drugs because I love my wife and my daughter!” is the oldest excuse for slinging cocaine on American streets in the book. But Love’s interest in “White Tide” isn’t so much the story of Hyden’s ill-fated enterprise as it is the factors that motivate people to do things they know they oughtn’t to do but they do anyway. You can raise an eyebrow at Hyden if you like; he willingly, knowingly broke the law for his own gain, believing in his own entitlement to do so. (That’s the coded meaning behind his pleas later in the film: He describes his bid for the cocaine as “an opportunity,” as if selling something like coke is the same thing as selling a commodity allowable by law.)
But “White Tide” doesn’t think of Hyden as a bad guy, and you won’t either, even if it’s beyond argument that he did a really bad thing. At least he paid for it. Unpacking that last line would give away the movie, of course, but c’mon: You’re not going into the theater expecting that a dude who’s willing to go on camera and talk about that one time he dug up a bunch of coke to sell it didn’t wind up facing some kind of consequence for it. That’s where Love’s refreshingly neutral (or neutral-adjacent) eye comes in handy. It invites us to form an opinion about Hyden without necessarily judging him. Andy’s opening interrogation lingers in the mind, too. If you’re watching “White Tide” in the comfort of a theater, you’ll scoff and respond with a quick “no,” but deep in the recesses of your conscience, you might also be wondering whether you’d do the same thing as Hyden.
Documentary purists might struggle with “White Tide” because it’s so fundamentally not what we think of when we think of a documentary film. At times it practically plays like a thriller, and if a documentary is thrilling, is it really a documentary? In short, yes. It’s not like “Kate Plays Christine” doesn’t hinge on reenactment, after all, and it’s not as if “Nuts!”, another great “stranger than fiction” doc in which the subject matter is only half as bizarre as the fact that it’s true. If “White Tide” feels finessed, in other words, well, that’s because it is to an extent. But it’s also real, as told from the mouths of the people whose experiences provide its bedrock. Hyden should be pleased to see the story of his life made into cinema, and we should be pleased for the chance to explore our morality through Love’s complicated, layered lens. [B]
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