The Boys in the Boat

Seeing the trailer and marketing for this movie, I immediately flagged it as Oscar-bait. I think it’s because my instinct is that the Academy is sentimental: see CODA, Nomadland, Green Book, The King’s Speech, and so on. Granted, that’s not always what wins, especially in recent years, such as with last year’s Everything Everywhere All At Once. But there’s this formula for a bland movie, often based on a book (which may itself be based on a true story), with seemingly little artistic merit, not much to say, and which isn’t going to make money. They usually feature one or two actors on the rise who are trying to make it to the next level. In a prior era, maybe these plays would have worked. But in a time when we seem to have a limited appetite for inspirational sports dramas, and the mid-budget movie is a rarity, there’s a good chance it ends up high and dry.

Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) has been on his own since he was a teenager, abandoned by his father to try to find work in the Great Depression. Now a student at the University of Washington, Joe needs a way to pay his tuition while keeping a roof over his head. His friend Don (Jack Mulhern) notes that the rowing team offers team members a room and some work. So despite neither of them having rowed before, they try out. Along with a few hundred others. For eight spots.

After a grueling week of work and many blisters, being our protagonist, Joe of course makes the team (along with Don). So now it’s up to Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgarton) to whip them into shape as the JV boat. When some adjustments have them consistently making fools of the Varsity team, it becomes clear Ulbrickson has something special on his hands. Which is fortunate, as the Olympics are fast approaching.

If you’ve heard the premise of the movie, then you know just about all the major plot beats. The movie’s existence alone defuses almost all of the tension that could possibly exist in each race. They only discuss the races we’re shown, and we’re only shown important races. As such, the outcomes are never in question, although you may be interested to see how they pull them off. Of course, it also serves to highlight just how contrived the whole situation feels, as it uses some rote tactics to heighten the drama, eliciting a stronger than usual eye-roll since you know it won’t matter.

And it’s not just the races themselves. Any time some wild-card element is introduced, it’s either resolved in the next scene or two, or else quickly forgotten. They never come into play, never form some obstacle. It feels like there’s a clear runway from start to finish. Which just isn’t very interesting. The movie’s entire appeal comes from the underlying “facts of the case” being fascinating, and it does little to capitalize on that to tell an engaging story.

There are a few small subplots around the racing which fill out the runtime, but they feel incredibly slight and meaningless. Although I must say that Hadley Robinson does an admirable job with the little she’s given as Joe’s love interest, Joyce Simdars. She’s bubbly and charming and full of personality, which all those Boys lack. In fact, the whole first act has a decent set of supporting characters. But they melt away afterwards, carrying on lifelessly in the background. They turn to Joe’s relationship to boats and the team’s boatbuilder, George Pocock (Peter Guinness), as well as his absent father Harry (Alec Newman), and…that’s it.

If you’ve read the book or seen the trailer, you may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned the Nazis. Well, for one, the movie never uses the term, always referring to them as simple Germans, despite the presence of huge swastikas when the travel to Germany for the 1936 Olympics. But also, this movie mostly avoids any politics. It’s relying on its portrayals and imagery to make a statement, but it doesn’t. The sharpest moment is when members of the Hitler Youth greet the rowers (in uniform, complete with armbands) upon their arrival, and the Americans don’t bat an eye. Maybe that’s intended as the statement: Americans were so open to and comfortable with the Nazis that they barely took any note of their presence. However, it comes off as the movie not seeing them as worthy of commenting on, nor on the American decision to participate.

You can’t point to the book as the reason, either. I haven’t read it, but according to Wikipedia, it spends a lot of time documenting how the Nazis covered up their atrocities in preparation for the Games. I guess screenwriter Mark L. Smith didn’t think including any of that context was important.

What does this film get right? Well, it does a good job with the rowing. It successfully impresses upon you the importance of teamwork to the sport, and how the timing being even slightly off can mess everything up. It quickly notes the exact role and importance of the different seats, as well as the type of rower they require, enough that you’ll get the gist for the duration of the film, and forget immediately after. As for strategy, we hear them talk about it and execute it, but they never try to impress upon us the why. As such, the idea that the coxswain Bobby (Luke Slattery) is a maverick who does his own thing against Coach Ulbrickson’s wishes doesn’t really land. But it works well enough.

Enough that I did find myself tearing up as the team hits some of those emotional highs, even as I rolled my eyes. I’m not entirely sure how in the hell that happened, as I felt little emotion throughout. I guess I’m still a sports fan at heart, and seeing an “underdog” shock everyone and win, combined with their own exuberance, can’t help but have an impact on me. Even if it seems unearned.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know if you’ll like this movie. There are no twists and turns, nothing surprising or new. The characters are all flat as boards, barely distinguishable from each other, and the ways in which they are don’t matter. This is a film with nothing to say except “Hey! Look at these Boys. They’re certainly in a Boat, aren’t they? And they go fast.” I guess for some people, that’s enough.