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THE BOYS IN THE BOAT
Director: George Clooney Cast: Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Sam Strike, Hadley Robinson, Peter Guinness, Thomas Elms, Jack Mulhern, Luke Slattery, Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Wil Coban, Tom Varey, Joel Phillimore, James Wolk, Courtney Henggeler, Chris Diamantopoulos, Glenn Wrage MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:04 Release Date: 12/25/23 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 23, 2023 The Boys in the Boat is an inherently misleading title for this movie. The story, based on the non-fiction book by Daniel James Brown, is about a team of nine college rowers on the University of Washington crew. It's the mid-1930s. The United States is struggling under the economic devastation of the Great Depression, and along comes this underdog team from a public university with a history of failure in this sport, a lack of talent and funding to match their primarily Ivy League competition, and an unlikely dream to make it to the 1936 Olympics. That setup and the existence of both a book and a movie dramatization make the end result of this story pretty much inevitable. We know this, and filmmakers should be generous enough to assume that basic level of intelligence on the part of an audience. The focus of such a story, a part of recorded history and another example of well-trodden movie formula, probably shouldn't be on the attempted suspense of whether or not the underdogs will win. Unless there's some anomaly within the tale (which there isn't here), the destination doesn't matter. It should be all about how and why these characters get there. This movie, written by Mark L. Smith and directed by George Clooney, doesn't understand that, unfortunately. It follows the clear-cut path of so many other actually or allegedly inspirational sports dramas, while doing very little to fill in the details of the skill necessary for and the process of rowing crew, the climate of its era, or even the lives of its central characters outside of sitting in a boat or waiting to do so. In fact, Smith barely bothers with most of those characters. The title is misleading, because it's primarily about a single young man in that boat. He's Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who has essentially been orphaned after the death of his mother and his father left him behind so that the old man could look for work and start a new family. Joe is lucky to be at this academic institution given his financial circumstances, but at the start of the story, he's about to be kicked out for failure to pay tuition. He needs to find a job and fast. An opportunity arises when Joe's buddy and classmate Roger (Sam Strike) learns of the university's rowing team, which promises to pay a regular wage to anyone who makes the crew. That's easier said than done, because Al Urbrickson (Joel Edgerton), the coach, only wants the best and puts all of those prospects through rigorous training and tests to ensure he finds them. With that lengthy sequence, Smith pretty much gives us the course of the rest of the story, while Clooney establishes the sort of repetitive rhythm that the movie can't even establish as a core tenet of the sport. What follows, basically, is a series of montages—of the recruits training, of the newly formed team practicing, of a competition here or there, of more practice, a brief respite of the team raising money when one inevitable thing happens, of more training and more competitions. Clooney pretty much gives us the same three camera setups in each of these sequences: close-ups of individual members of the crew straining with physical exertion, long shots of the team's boat in relation to their opponents, and reaction shots of the coach as he's either surprised by or disappointed in his team (Later, there are random reaction shots of Adolf Hitler, too, and no shot of that particular figure should ever have the feeling of randomness). There's not much to them stylistically, in other words, or on a practical level, since everyone's very vague about the practice of rowing or philosophical about the importance of a team—without ever explaining or showing how any of that actually matters to the sport itself. There are moments outside of practices and competitions, of course, although the majority of them follow Joe in his young romance with the pretty Joyce (Hadley Robinson) or show us that the young man has made it on his own—no thanks to his absent father but with a lot of hard work. As for the other team members, well, they row or, in the case of coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery), yell for everyone to row. Apart from Roger and Bobby, the characters are present and more akin to props than people with even a semblance of personality. On every level, then, The Boys in the Boat is routine and often dull. It doesn't do the basic work to make this tale inspiring, which is some kind of accomplishment, given the story it's telling. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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