Rowing is usually seen, with good reason, as a sport for posh kids. But it wasn’t always thus. The University Of Washington team that competed in the 1930s was made up of Depression-era hustlers, kids who relied on their place in the boat for food and shelter. That’s what gives George Clooney’s likeable but slight new film its resonance and high stakes, even if at times it feels like inspirational sports filmmaking by numbers.
As in the non-fiction book by Daniel James Brown, these scrappy, blue-collar rowers square off against much more storied and moneyed teams for the chance to represent the US in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Our hero is Callum Turner’s Joe Rantz, the would-be engineer who becomes the boat’s number seven oarsman. Joe has all the prickly temper of a teen who has had to fend for himself for years, who will show no weakness around his fellows, but is also desperately in need of a helping hand. That is finally extended by Joel Edgerton's Coach Al, a seasoned competitor who is under pressure to deliver a win.
Effectively channels its class warfare and the excitement of the races, but occasionally defaults to soapy side-plots.
The book is fascinating, though often explains intricate details in a way that any film would struggle to replicate. Instead, Clooney effectively channels its class warfare and the excitement of the races, but occasionally defaults to soapy side-plots about Joe’s relationship with his family and sweet girlfriend Joyce (Hadley Robinson), and a howler of a framing device that caps the film with a thuddingly corny last line.
This all takes time away from the team and their relationships, which is a shame when the whole thrust of the story is about the nine young men learning to work as one and trust one another absolutely. And they’re not a bad bunch: Turner makes an immensely sympathetic and charismatic protagonist and has good support from Edgerton and the other rowers. Not all get enough screen-time, but Jack Mulhern is fun as the boat’s stroke, and Luke Slattery as maverick cox Bobby Moch.
The film would have done better to take its own mantra to heart, and focus more closely on the fellowship of boys in the boat. As it is, it’s a pleasant introduction to a fascinating bit of history, but no world-beater.
