An underdog team of novice rowers from Washington University defies expectations, making it to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. (Note: for my plot re-cap go here.)
It’s a shame George Clooney’s feelgood rags-to-Olympic-riches story wasn’t released here over Christmas as it was in the US, as it would make a great cross-generational family cinema trip. It’s an enjoyably predictable two hours of screen time, and while there isn’t much in the way of tension, generally after several “festive” days stuck en famille more tension is the last thing we need.
Despite its by-numbers movie making, and even as I knew I was being thrown the bait and reeled in, I still fell hook, line and sinker for (almost) every cliché Clooney chucks our way. On it glides, like the freshly varnished boat Husky Clipper through the waters of the Hudson River at the Poughkeepsie Regatta. And yet there is something deeply comforting about The Boys In The Boat too, like knowing your mum’s made her annual Christmas pudding even though no one actually eats it.
I watched this on a screener during Twixmas (the few days between Christmas and New Year, so-called because we survive those days on the Celebrations no one wanted), and as the film unfolded various family members appeared. Initially this was just for the excitement of spotting local rowing landmarks (“that’s Upper Thames Rowing Club! That’s the bit… just along from Upper Thames Rowing Club!”) yet each one then snared by Clooney’s sugar-coated sporting escapades.
The Boys In The Boat is a mixture of very minor and very major happenings. Alongside a minor walk-out, a very small punch-up, a bit of romance and a train almost missed we have the Great Depression, actual Olympic gold medals and, finally, a petulant Adolf Hitler.
Set during the Great Depression, those scenes are steeped in artful grimness. Boots are holed, donkey jackets bear rips, but it smacks of movieland genteel poverty rather than a miserable period of financial terror.
Joe Rance (Callum Turner) owes a term’s fees to Washington University, and is told to get a job, only there aren’t any; eventually fellow student Roger Morris (Sam Strike) suggests they apply to join the university rowing eight, mainly because they’ll get a wage. Scores of other young men have the same idea, though both Joe and Roger make the team. (While Clooney rarely subverts a cliché in The Boys In The Boat, I did enjoy the exhausting montage of what I assumed was a week of running, rowing, and endless sit ups in a desperate attempt to make the grade, only to discover this was all on the first day.)
Joe has an interesting back story — mother dead, abandoned by his father at 14, somehow getting himself to university — and now finds himself, having tried to follow the American dream, living in a battered car in a slum and eating at soup kitchens. We do meet his father later on, but sadly in Clooney’s hands Joe’s present is not as interesting as his unseen past.
There’s also something incongruous about the looming evils of the time (fascism in Europe, poverty and racism in America — Jesse Owens, about to break records in Berlin, points out to a fellow teammate he’s doing it not to show the Germans but “the folks back home”) juxtaposed with the film’s wholesome if shallow beauty, and Clooney doesn’t manage to marry those discordant aspects to any great effect.
While Turner is tall and imposing he doesn’t really make an individual mark. Though as a group the actors portraying the working and lower middle class crew, trying to make it through university by the well-worn seats of their pants, are good: they exude an air of slump-shouldered stoicism, with the quietness of people who well understand the deliberately small worlds of the privileged, not looking outwards and not wanting to. And this despite us never even hearing from some of them.
This is where I should say the real star of the film is the boat, or shell, the Husky Clipper, lovingly crafted by master boatmaker George Pocock (Peter Guinness, giving out silky, low-voiced advice to crew and coaches alike), and co-varnished by him and Joe. Though beautiful as the boat is, the real hero is actually not that, or Joe, or even the rather too reticent coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, sadly often just glowering from under his trilby).
No, it’s the team’s pocket rocket cox Bobby Moch (an excellent Luke Slattery), brought in to drive them on to victories greater than brute strength alone could reach. With a loudhailer literally strapped to his face, he’s angry, forceful, encouraging, and grimacing, quivering through his inverted metal beak as his crew nears a finish line that only he, facing forward in the boat, can actually see.
In fact while Clooney’s Oscar-eyeing earnestness leaves much of the film plodding, it is spectacularly saved by the race scenes which are both riveting and exhilarating.
“Six boats of want-too versus one boat of have-too”, states the Poughkeepsie Regatta announcer, a situation paralleled in the juxtaposition of the view from overhead — the serenity, the symmetry, each boat looking poised and paused on the glassy water — and on the surface, the grinding, groaning oars and grimacing faces of the Husky Clipper’s crew. Cox Moch at the end of the boat is puppet master to the Eight’s marionettes, his controlled fury driving them on, and once they reach Berlin and the Olympic final a combination of empathy and sheer will forcing the feverish Don Hume (Jack Mulhern) to wakefulness and full strength as they race from the very back of the pack to the finish line.
Actually the trains are another highlight, and not just because most Brits have an opinion on them. “You couldn’t do that now, the doors lock before it starts!” said one family member sagely, as Joe, snogging his girlfriend Joyce on the platform, does a little jog to the open door of the moving train and climbs slowly on as it chugs out of the station. “Those are British Rail carriages and they were introduced after 1936, actually,” said another. “Doesn’t it look romantic!” said a third (me). And I defy any rowing fan who has ever tried to walk along a jam-packed Regatta towpath not to yearn wistfully for the steam train that chugs down the banks along the course of the Poughkeepsie Regatta, a race-side view for coaches and spectators alike.
The Boys In The Boat was released in US cinemas on Christmas Day 2023 and in UK cinemas on 12 January 2024. Missed anything? Read The Boys In The Boat ending: down the last straight
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