There is a certain audience for "The Boys in the Boat," George Clooney's aggressively old-fashioned, deep varnished, based-on-a-true-story sports movie. And given what we know of demographics, that audience likely overlaps with the audience for a movie review in a daily general interest newspaper. It is the sort of movie they don't make anymore -- the sort of movie that used to win Academy Awards and slip smoothly into our collective reservoir of images.
Had it been released in 1981, "The Boys in the Boat" might have had the same effect on the zeitgeist as "Chariots of Fire."
These days, it feels like a pleasant anachronism, a worthy but head-scratchingly strange effort. An underdog film about the 1936 University of Washington rowing team? Sure, but don't expect any Oscar glory to come of it.
It's not my job to handicap a film's award-grabbing potential (or to speculate on its commercial prospects). But watching "Boys in the Boat," I couldn't help but think how much my dad would have liked the film.
I'll try to keep this spoiler-free, though anyone with Google already knows how the story ends. And it is quite a story.
Joe Rantz (British actor Callum Turner) was essentially abandoned by his family when he was 14 years old (his mother died of cancer when he was very young, his father remarried and the stepmother had kids of her own) and living in an unfinished house in a Depression-ear Hooverville when he somehow put himself through high school and gained admission to the University of Washington.
He tried out for the college's rowing team because he understood the athletes got a small stipend and a place to live as well as a break on tuition. Rantz was determined to become an engineer, not a legend.
That's reflected in Callum's no-nonsense portrayal of the kid, though the crown of blond hair -- which might have been natural to the real Rantz but looks like a glowing special effect on the actor -- distracts from Callum's nicely calibrated, understated performance. Rantz is no pop idol; he's a hard kid, but not a bad kid, and is genuinely grateful for the opportunity.
He's also a remarkable raw athletic talent.
But raw talent is nothing without discipline and direction, and when Rantz competes with 50 other students for a place on the nine-man crew, we understand the training will be grueling. It's not only the physical demands that are challenging -- you have to be strong and extremely cardio-fit -- it's the timing that makes the team excel.
Apparently if rowers are out of sync even by margins imperceptible to the untrained eye, they are fighting their teammates. This need for perfect synchronization is what makes crew -- according to coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) -- "the most difficult team sport in the world."
While I'm not sure I'm willing to believe this, I am willing to believe that rowers believe it and that this need for teamwork can serve as a hammer for which to flatten the nonconformist. Al needs his rowers to be human machines, driven by the same internal clock, not creative individuals given to flighty self-expression. It wouldn't have taken much to warp this movie into a kind of communist parable prettied up by dappled sunlight and the knife-clean poetry of dipping oars.
So naturally expect an "Officer and a Gentleman" type showdown between stone-faced Al (Edgerton's character never smiles) and rough-hewn Rantz; the film's only real surprise is how mild that confrontation is when it finally comes. That's in part because it (probably) happened that way, but also because Clooney is more interested in showing how these poor boys (and most Washington rowers were lower-class kids) pulled together to beat out the swells from Harvard and Yale to compete against Hitler's Aryan elite (and the rest of the world ) at the 1936 games in Berlin.
Those games are famous because of Jesse Owens and his Fuhrer-tweaking highlights. (Owens, played by Jyuddah Jaymes, has what amounts to a cameo in the movie.)
This being a traditional Hollywood movie, the classicist Clooney does supply Rantz with a love interest -- Joyce (Hadley Robinson) takes about five seconds to fall deeply, madly and authentically in love with him -- and the actual boat races are more exciting than we might have expected.
This isn't a great movie, and it may not even be a movie that most 21st-century people will want to watch, but there's no denying the quality of the production values and Clooney's mastery. He's made exactly what he wanted to make.
It's old-fashioned, and there are plenty of people who will see that as a virtue. This is an earnest and, frankly, square film. It's pretty and has a moral. If it feels quaint and stagy, the problem may well rest with our attenuated attention spans and jaded sensibilities.
It may well find an audience, but it probably won't find much favor with not many critics or awards-bestowing bodies.
My dad would have liked it. And that, for me, is reason enough to wish it well.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
Chris Diamantopoulos as Royal Brougham, Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and James Wolk as Coach Tom Bolles in George Clooney's "Boys in the Boat." More News
None'The Boys in the Boat'
- 85 Cast: Joel Edgerton, Callum Turner, Hadley Robinson, Thomas Elms, Jack Mulhern, Peter Guinness, Sam Strike, Luke Slattery, James Wolk, Glenn Wrage
- Director: George Clooney
- Rating: PG-13
- Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes
Playing theatrically; opening on Christmas Day