The Boys in the Boat [Review]
George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat is a predictable feel-good movie.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios
The Boys in the Boat is the story of the rowing team from the University of Washington that makes its way to the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany and takes the gold, adapted from the bestselling non-fiction book written by Daniel James Brown. George Clooney directs from a script by Mark L. Smith. This is a predictable feel-good sports movie about underdogs making their way to triumph against the odds, a movie perfectly primed for a Christmas season release. However, the movie misses the mark; it’s decent but not memorable.
The cast is led by Callum Turner as Joe Rantz and Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson. Joe, an engineering student living in a car in a shantytown, is desperately looking for work to pay his tuition. He and his friend Roger Morris (Sam Strike) find that there’s an opportunity to get money and lodging by joining the rowing team. They make it past trials, and the rest of the film is devoted to continued training, the Olympic qualifier race against east coast teams, and finally the Olympic Games. There’s also an unremarkable romantic subplot between Joe and Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson), his future wife.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios
Everything in the movie is paint-by-numbers cliche for this kind of inspirational sports film. Director George Clooney handles this well, but doesn’t let the movie reach its true potential. The missing piece is that everything in the film seems to come too easy. Anything that would be a setback to its characters is nearly instantly resolved or turns out to not be a problem. An ill oarsman? He’s well enough to race when it comes time to compete. Joe is kicked from his seat on the boat because his personal turmoil has him in the wrong headspace? Next morning he apologizes and everything is fine. Likewise, we see no races lost. The team simply trains hard, and everything is fine. The end result is insufficient conflict, and when we already know how the movie will end, this makes for an uninteresting story.
With some cursory research, I discovered that there’s more going on in the book; the film is understandably simplified and streamlined, but there was room to add more to the struggle—both personally for Joe and also for the team. The book also includes a subplot about how the Nazis built up the 1936 Olympic Games into a propaganda opportunity to deceive the world. As far as the Nazis go, all we get in the movie is a Hitler that comes off as comical and can’t be taken seriously.
The Boys in the Boat is a decent enough time, but doesn’t leave a lasting impression.
The Boys In the Boat will debut in theaters on December 25, 2023.
