The Boys in the Boat (2023 | USA | 124 minutes | George Clooney)
The holiday film opening with the most local relevance is almost certainly The Boys in the Boat. It tells the inspirational true story of the UW eight man crew team that improbably dominated better funded collegiate competition, made it to the 1936 Olympics, and showed Hitler the power of good old fashioned American determination. It’s an incredible story, but when everyone in the audience knows exactly what’s going to happen at the end, it’s incumbent on a filmmaker to discover some drama in the middle. Unfortunately, George Clooney’s strictly competent treatment of Daniel James Brown’s book is so workmanlike in hitting all of its marks that it never even seems to consider finding a single spark of personality among the young men or the coaches whose achievements were so remarkable.
Framed in groan-worthy flashback — an older man watches his grandson struggle to paddle in a river as more accomplished rowers swoop by — the story centers on Callum Turner as Joe Rantz. He’s an abandoned kid from Sequim who’s seeking an Engineering degree from the University of Washington and sleeping in a Pioneer Square junkyard (yes, there’s a junkyard dog and a silhouette of King Street Station). Struggling to pay his tuition, he learns that earning a spot on the crew team (a sport he’s never before tried) could be the answer to his financial troubles. Although the rigorous tryouts under the gruff supervision of Joel Edgerton’s Coach Al Ulbrickson are meant to be grueling and dramatic, all of the handsomest boys get spots in the junior boat through some force of determined desperate will and exceptional physical gifts. Problem solved, these inexperienced rowers get warm cots on campus, some spending money, a place to sleep, and a chance to excel. The theme of rowing is that the boat operates “as one”, so it’s perhaps it’s a storytelling technique that most of the team is an interchangeable blur. Like the direction, Turner’s perfectly capable, but the whole thing — from his campus romance to a his mentorship with the team’s boat maker — is incredibly bland. Like many of his fellow rowers, he’s also in his thirties playing a teenager, which happens all the time yet robs the audience of truly appreciating the unlikeliness of a bunch of malnourished kids outcompeting elite athletes.
Between their daily toils on the water, the boys get up to PG hijinks on campus and have the most minor character development. It’s all very predictable and the practicalities of not filming actual athletes on real waters make for a lot of quick cuts and close-ups of oars straining, paddles splashing, and mid-shots of fit bodies heaving in sync rather than dynamic shots capturing a whole boat in motion. It’s a pity that it isn’t better, but Clooney leverages the power of an underdog story to make racing scenes stirring even when the results are never in doubt. The coolest part is a sequence where wealthy regatta watchers get to follow the whole race while sipping champagne on an open air train that tracks the action. That’s some turn of the century luxury I can get behind.
Little moments of adversity, like a fight with the coach or a feverish lead oar, are easily overcome on the certain path toward the Berlin games. There, the boys get a cameo with Jesse Owens (a brief acknowledgement that some Americans had an even tougher time that a bunch of poor white guys) and some laughable cutaways to a sneering Adolf Hitler in the stands. It’s all laughably-old fashioned, but you’d need a heart of stone not to cheer along as they race into the history books (if people in Seattle theaters don’t sing along with the fight song, you know they’re a cop).
Nevertheless, it has a great trailer (when they played it at a Husky football game this fall, the crowd lost their minds) and is going to do great business, at least here in the northwest where it’s a foundational myth. Although Clooney filmed most of it outside London with a recreation of the ASUW shell house and questionable CGI to put the boys on Lake Washington’s waters, he did come to town for a private party premiere, giving the director, dignitaries, and a classroom of kids from Sequim a first look at the newly-reopened SIFF Cine[ram]a Downtown. Of everything in theaters for the year-end crunch, it’s easily the most friendly across the demographic spectrum: it’ll paddle along to its assured triumphant conclusion without offending anyone (except for readers of the book who will insist that it deserved better). Nothing wrong with a little feel good sports movie for the whole family in the midst of a hectic week of holiday stress.
The Boys in the Boat opens on December 25th; images courtesy Amazon MGM.