A story like that of the 1936 University of Washington junior rowing team seems tailor-made to get the big-screen treatment. It’s got everything: thrilling races, affable characters, and, perhaps most important of all, a welcome positive message about improbable triumphs—all against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. And while George Clooney’s handsomely mounted The Boys In The Boat delivers on all of those fronts, the period piece remains a rather inert proposition, a beautiful postcard of a film.
When we first meet Joe Rantz (a dashing and deep-voiced blond Callum Turner), he’s down on his luck. An orphan for all intents and purposes, Joe’s made it to the University of Washington. But the way he lives in squalor in Seattle shows he’s barely eking by. Indeed, in quick succession, with scenes that serve as blunt character backstory vignettes, we learn he’s resourceful (he folds a newspaper into his boot to plug a hole in his sole); he’s disciplined (he doesn’t let himself be distracted while attending his engineering classes); and he’s broke (he can’t even muster up enough change for a meal at the school’s cafeteria). If only he could come up with a way to pay for the tuition that’s due amid a financial crisis that’s affecting workers and students everywhere. Enter rowing.
As Joe’s friend Roger (Sam Strike) soon informs him, any student who makes it onto the rowing team gets a room and even the prospect of a job to help them get by. Thus a montage ensues wherein we watch Joe and Roger get put through a grueling tryout by the team’s coach, Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton). And would you believe it, both make the team, alongside a number of ambitious boys who find in rowing a makeshift community of like-minded guys who’ll buoy their spirits whenever they’re in need. That is when Ulbrikson and Coach Tom Bolles (James Wolk) aren’t driving them all to their limits.
From there on out, The Boys In The Boat follows the junior team as they struggle together in order to not embarrass their coach, and later still work even harder to compete at higher levels—eventually making it to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics in an improbable turn of events. The story has all the requisite beats for an inspirational sports flick—and finds, in turn, time to stage a romance between Joe and Joyce (Hadley Robinson), a flirty girl from his childhood, and even various moments of male bonding between the boys, all while tracing inner turmoil at the university and later at the Olympics that threaten to derail the promising young boys’ athletic prowess.
On paper (and in Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name) the tale of these young rowers who defied the odds and stuck it to those privileged Ivy League folks (and those Germans!), whom they crushed on the water, is quite gripping—even as Clooney’s direction aims for being mostly unfussy and briskly efficient. As is Mark L. Smith’s screenplay, in fact, whose workmanlike effort actually blunts much of the message of the film.
Rowing, as The Boys In The Boat will remind us again and again, is a team sport. Not just in the sense that it requires a rowing team to work together, but in that any one individual cannot stand out, let alone stand in for the whole. And yet the film opts to anchor its storytelling on Joe, a charming young lad whose story is supposed to telegraph the many ways in which this rowing team was full of misfits and underdogs. For a film about teamwork, this narrow scope feels at odds with the very essence of the team—even, or especially when it tries to infuse any kind of lyricism into its dialogue (“Rowing is more poetry than sport,” we’re told at one point. In earnest. Yes, really.)
Craft-wise, at least Clooney has assembled as fine-tuned a crew as coach Ulbrickson did, with director of photography Martin Ruhe, composer Alexandre Desplat and editor Tanya M. Swerling all bringing the actor-turned-director’s vision to life. One just wishes the painterly backdrops of Depression-era Seattle, the sun-dappled shots of rowed water, and the anguished looks of those dapper rowing boys (oft-scored by swelling music helpfully nudging us to feel inspired or despondent, depending on the shot) didn’t all feel so wooden and sterile. You cheer on these boys but you’re not left with much once the credits roll and their story becomes but a wistful tale of a time gone by.
The Boys in the Boat opens in theaters on December 25