The Boys in the Boat Gets Stuck in the Shallows

I n 1936, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin. Only the Soviet Union and a small number of Jewish athletes refused to participate. Three years later Germany invaded Poland, four years later the Nazis marched into Paris, and five years later Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the deadliest conflict in world history. That timeline is a remarkable illustration of how quickly international relations can disintegrate.

During the interwar period and Great Depression, the U.S. unemployment rate reached 20 percent — a trend the mobilization of a wartime economy would help reverse.

It is this period of profound political and economic unrest that provides the backdrop to George Clooney’s new sports drama, The Boys in the Boat, an adaptation of Daniel James Brown’s narrative nonfiction book by the same name. It tells the story of the University of Washington’s rowing team, an unlikely assortment of young men from working-class backgrounds who competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

We meet Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a University of Washington student who is so poor he lives in a car and fills the holes in his shoes with newspaper. Rantz falls behind on his college tuition and has two weeks to come up with the balance. It’s then that his friend, Roger (Sam Strike), suggests that they try out for the rowing team — a paying job with board included. They make it through the highly competitive, grueling trials set by the austere Coach Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), then onto national championships, then ultimately the Olympic Games.

Brown’s book is structured along two backstories culminating in the final race. First, the team members’ personal and social histories; how they struggled as individuals during the Depression and how they struggled as a team in a sport that requires near-perfect synchronization. Second, Hitler’s investment in the Olympic Games as a propaganda effort and the symbolic power of the Washington boys’ victory.

By contrast, the movie focuses heavily on one character, Joe Rantz, and barely touches on the Germans at all. It is structured as a series of predictable psychodramas. For instance, Rantz is poor but proud. He declines a free hot meal at a soup kitchen when he spots a classmate who is serving the hungry. Later, a fellow rower calls him “hobo Joe,” and they nearly get into a scrap. This rower apologizes afterward saying, “We’re not different you and me,” explaining that the only reason he’s well-dressed is because he steals clothes.

We learn that Rantz’s father remarried after his mother died and showed little interest in raising him. George Yeomans Pocock (Peter Guinness), the racing shell’s designer and unofficial life coach, takes an interest in Rantz’s backstory, and at various points offers some free psychotherapy and inspiration: “Your dad gave up on you. He quit on you. All you know is quitting. But it seems to me you’re not him. Or are you?”

Rantz begins a wholesome romance with his classmate, Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson), who in real life he later married. “You’re gonna get all famous and you’re going to forget about me,” she tells Rantz, early in their courtship. Based on the characterization of Rantz in the movie, that insecurity would appear well-founded. Simdars pursues Rantz, not the other way round. When she confesses her love for him, his response is lackluster and unclear as to whether he reciprocates.

The coach has his own internal dramas to contend with. He upsets the board by choosing the junior team over the seniors. Initially, they don’t have enough money to take the team to Berlin, so they have to crowdsource. Once in Germany, a teammate Don Hume (Jack Mulhern) gets sick. Is he too sick to row?! These problem-resolution sequences happen so often and so quickly that not only do they fail to build dramatic momentum, but they also come across as cheap, like something from the scriptwriter’s cheat sheet.

Perhaps a touch of humor might have helped, a la Cool Runnings (1993), but Coach Ulbrickson is tediously self-important. Rowing is the “most difficult sport in the world,” he says (really?) and “more poetry than sport.” After he chooses the team, he laments that he has “the strongest group but the worst crew.” He agonizes about sending them “out there when they’re not ready.” Spoiler alert — they are ready. Throughout the movie, we never see them lose.

Or if not humor, then how about some depth, a la Chariots of Fire (1981)? Coach tells Rantz, “I know it’s not easy to trust everyone on that boat as much as yourself. But it’s not about you. . . It’s about the boat.” Rantz, after reconsidering his throwaway comment that he doesn’t care about the outcome of the race, comes to his senses, realizing that the boat is “all I got. My boys. I can’t lose that.”

Rantz’s animating motivation is not his country, his God, or his girl (in whom he shows only a mild interest), but his team, for whom we have only the roughest character sketches and allusions to friendship.

There are moments when The Boys in the Boat attempts to say something of deeper significance. An Olympic commentator sets the scene as “a boat full of underdogs representing an underdog nation.” There is a hammy performance of Hitler (Daniel Philpott), agitated and on the edge of his seat watching the Washington boys racing ahead of the German rowing team; Germany won five of seven gold medals for rowing events in 1936.

One saving grace was the costumes (Jenny Eagan), which were delightful. So many hats! And almost enough to obscure the fact that this movie could have been set at any time, in any place, with any team sport, and had much the same script. What is this movie about? “It’s about the boat.” And what does that represent? [Insert inane platitude here.]