THE BOYS IN THE BOAT reviewed by GREG KING
Director: George Clooney
Stars: Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Sam Strike, Peter Guinness, Hadley Robinson, Luke Slattery, Jack Mulhern, Thomas Elms, Tom Varey, Courtney Henggeler, James Wolk, Chris Diamantopoulos.
Yet another crowd-pleasing underdog sports story from Hollywood, The Boys In The Boat is a dramatisation of the true story of how the junior rowing team from the University of Washington triumphed against the odds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
America is in the middle of the depression. University students like Joe Rantz (played here by Callum Turner, from The Only Living Boy In New York, etc) who was studying engineering, were struggling to pay their tuition. Joe, whose mother had died when he was young and who was then abandoned by his father who headed off elsewhere to find work, could hardly make ends meet. He spent most nights sleeping in a dilapidated car in a wrecking yard and he even patches the holes in his shoes with bits of newspaper. Then he heard from fellow student Roger (Sam Strike) that the rowing program was paying money for recruits.
He enrolled in the program and, through perseverance and hard work was eventually selected to be part of the eight-member team. The program supplied wages and board and Joe quickly became one of the natural leaders of his squad. He also formed a close bond with the affable, avuncular and wise boat builder George Peacock (Peter Guinness, from tv series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, etc).
Under legendary head coach, the gruff, hard-bitten Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, recently seen in Master Gardener, etc), the team came together and learned how to work in synch. They found success despite the numerous obstacles in their paths, from richer, more professional rowing teams to the backroom politics of the sporting bodies. But Ulbrickson’s team overcame all before them to be selected to represent the US at the Berlin Olympics. And against all odds they pulled off a come-from behind win against the unbeaten German rowing team, causing a massive upset.
This dramatised film is based on the 2013 best-selling non-fiction book The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown and has been adapted for the screen by Mark L Smith (The Revenant, etc). This inspiring story was also recounted in the 2016 PBS documentary The Boys Of 36, which used a lot of archival footage and delved deeper into Rantz’s personal history. It also reveals that Smith has taken some liberties with the story for dramatic purposes, for instance compressing the events of three years into one year. The inclusion of a subplot following a romance between Joe and Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson) becomes something of a formulaic affair and an unnecessary distraction that slows down the drama.
We don’t get a lot of personal detail about the other members of the rowing crew, and they mostly remain colourless and largely fail to leave an impression apart from Joe, who is the central character in the story, his mate Roger, coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) who sets the tempo for the crew, and lead rower Don Hume, (Jack Mulhern, from Mare Of Easttown, etc). Turner brings a gritty quality to his performance as Rantz, a poor boy determined to make the most of his opportunity with the rowing team. Mulhern has a brooding quality, and Edgerton is also very good as the nuggety Ulbrickson, who has faith in the abilities of his team.
The film has been solidly directed by George Clooney, whose passion for the project is obvious. However, his approach to the stirring material is a little old-fashioned. He milks the formulaic material for every drop of emotion, but he also does a superb job of injecting suspense and tension into the many boat racing sequences. There are plenty of slickly edited montages of training drills from Tanya Swerling that depict the amount of work that went into shaping the team and preparing them for the arduous races that lay ahead. Some great camerawork and drone shots from cinematographer Martin Rhue also bring the racing sequences alive.
The Boys In The Boat is a slick looking production largely due to Kalina Ivanov’s production design and Jenny Eagan’s costumes, both of which capture the Depression period nicely.
★★★
