The Boys in the Boat review – gen­tle, for­get­table sports drama

Lean­ing into his rep­u­ta­tion as the direc­tor behind films that exist pure­ly for your dad to fall asleep watch­ing in his favourite arm­chair, George Clooney’s lat­est out­ing con­cerns the sto­ry of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Washington’s row­ing team, who beat the odds to become Olympic cham­pi­ons in 1936. While those Olympics are best remem­bered for Jesse Owens‘ stag­ger­ing achieve­ments and as an aggres­sive pro­pa­gan­da event staged by Adolf Hitler, the Wash­ing­ton Huskies won the hearts of their home nation and roy­al­ly pissed off the Führer by tak­ing home the gold in the men’s eight, beat­ing Italy into sec­ond place by .6 of a second.

Based on Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name, The Boys in the Boat focus­es pri­mar­i­ly on one boy: Joe Rantz, played by a bleach-blonde Cal­lum Turn­er. A tac­i­turn work­ing-class boy from a small town in Wash­ing­ton, he raised him­self from the age of 14 after being left to his own devices by his father, who had remar­ried. He tries out for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Washington’s row­ing team because it comes with the promise of accom­mo­da­tion and pay – two things he needs to sup­port his engi­neer­ing degree. For Rantz, row­ing is a means to an end, but for coach Al Ulbrick­son (Joel Edger­ton) it’s a chance to show that tal­ent and deter­mi­na­tion can beat out privilege.

To get to the Olympics, the team will have to beat out their more monied Ivy League rivals. It’s dif­fi­cult to make this a tense plot point giv­en that we know the Wash­ing­ton team did beat them, and indeed did win Olympic gold, so screen­writer Mark L. Smith (who also wrote The Mid­night Sky) opts to focus more on the men them­selves, pri­mar­i­ly Rantz but also the shy Don Hume (Jack Mul­h­ern) and the dis­en­fran­chise­ment of work­ing clas­sic Amer­i­cans dur­ing the Great Depres­sion. Turn­er brings a steely deter­mi­na­tion to Rantz, but also a hid­den soft­ness that unfurls as he spends time with ship­wright George Yeo­mans Pocock (Peter Guin­ness). If any­thing, he does seem a lit­tle too vir­tu­ous – the inevitable moment of ten­sion late in the film comes when Rantz is too stub­born to admit how much the team means to him, and Ulbrick­son doubts his com­mit­ment as a result.

It’s a straight­for­ward sto­ry, told in Clooney’s increas­ing­ly straight­for­ward film­mak­ing style. No flour­ish­es, noth­ing too chal­leng­ing, just lots of nice shots of strap­ping young men row­ing big boats down open bod­ies of water, and a yearn­ing for the good old days, when young Amer­i­cans pulled them­selves up by their boot­straps instead of sit­ting around tweet­ing about the oppres­sive nature of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism and how decades of aggres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism and excep­tion­al­ism have ruined our hopes of ever liv­ing a good life.

But I digress! There’s much made of the row­ers’ deter­mi­na­tion, and how they bond­ed as a group, get­ting over their pet­ty dif­fer­ences to become life­long friends and a piece of Amer­i­can sport­ing his­to­ry. The film does gloss over the fact that after the Olympics, all the men pur­sued oth­er careers due to the nature of a prac­tice where mon­ey does sub­stan­tial­ly impact your abil­i­ty to suc­ceed, and the inclu­sion of some Hitler reac­tion shots dur­ing the cli­mac­tic Olympic race came off more com­i­cal than Clooney like­ly intend­ed, but as a fairy­tale about the pow­er of grit and hard work, it pass­es the time. There’s just noth­ing here to cement The Boys in the Boat as any­thing oth­er than a sort of inter­est­ing sto­ry made in a com­pe­tent but uncom­pli­cat­ed manner.