The Boys In The Boat review: Sports drama stretches for the finish line
George Clooney mounts a handsome but listless adaptation of the best-selling novel about the 1936 University of Washington rowing team
A story like that of the 1936 University of Washington junior rowing team seems tailor-made to get the big-screen treatment. It’s got everything: thrilling races, affable characters, and, perhaps most important of all, a welcome positive message about improbable triumphs—all against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the 1936 Berlin Olympics. And while George Clooney’s handsomely mounted The Boys In The Boat delivers on all of those fronts, the period piece remains a rather inert proposition, a beautiful postcard of a film.
When we first meet Joe Rantz (a dashing and deep-voiced blond Callum Turner), he’s down on his luck. An orphan for all intents and purposes, Joe’s made it to the University of Washington. But the way he lives in squalor in Seattle shows he’s barely eking by. Indeed, in quick succession, with scenes that serve as blunt character backstory vignettes, we learn he’s resourceful (he folds a newspaper into his boot to plug a hole in his sole); he’s disciplined (he doesn’t let himself be distracted while attending his engineering classes); and he’s broke (he can’t even muster up enough change for a meal at the school’s cafeteria). If only he could come up with a way to pay for the tuition that’s due amid a financial crisis that’s affecting workers and students everywhere. Enter rowing.
As Joe’s friend Roger (Sam Strike) soon informs him, any student who makes it onto the rowing team gets a room and even the prospect of a job to help them get by. Thus a montage ensues wherein we watch Joe and Roger get put through a grueling tryout by the team’s coach, Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton). And would you believe it, both make the team, alongside a number of ambitious boys who find in rowing a makeshift community of like-minded guys who’ll buoy their spirits whenever they’re in need. That is when Ulbrikson and Coach Tom Bolles (James Wolk) aren’t driving them all to their limits.
From there on out, The Boys In The Boat follows the junior team as they struggle together in order to not embarrass their coach, and later still work even harder to compete at higher levels—eventually making it to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics in an improbable turn of events. The story has all the requisite beats for an inspirational sports flick—and finds, in turn, time to stage a romance between Joe and Joyce (Hadley Robinson), a flirty girl from his childhood, and even various moments of male bonding between the boys, all while tracing inner turmoil at the university and later at the Olympics that threaten to derail the promising young boys’ athletic prowess.
