The Facts:
Synopsis: Tells the story of how a group of unassuming college boys from the University of Washington went from struggling through the Great Depression to securing a victory in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Stars: Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike, Alec Newman, Peter Guinness, Luke Slattery, Thomas Elms, Tom Varey, Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Wil Coban, Hadley Robinson, Courtney Henggeler, James Wolk, Chris Diamantopoulos
Director: George Clooney
Rated: PG-13
Running Length: 124 minutes
TMMM Score: (4/10)
Review: In this era obsessed with nostalgia, it’s understandable why a movie like The Boys in the Boat would appeal to studios still trying to get audiences back to the theaters. Take a best-selling novel about an All-American story, get a well-liked actor/director to film it, and have it ready for release on Christmas Day. You couldn’t have a better Christmas present for Dad if you put a big fat bow on it. The Boys in the Boat may have been a fine choice for your holiday viewing back in 1995, but viewed through our current lens, there’s something too old-fashioned about George Clooney’s new movie. They may “not make ’em like they used to” anymore…and pandering movies like this emotionless slog is why.
Based on Daniel James Brown’s much-loved book from 2013, The Boys in the Boat follows the University of Washington’s eight-man rowing team, rising from underdogs to Olympians in 1936. Most team members came from lower-class families and, amidst the worst days of the Depression, found their college careers in jeopardy. Securing a place on the team would ensure they could continue their education, but it would demand their physical aptitude be in top form. Learning to work together as a group instead of vying for glory as an individual would be a further part of their challenge as men growing up in the shadow of a grim economic future.
Led by Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, Master Gardener), who was under pressure to produce a crew that would wind up in the winner’s circle, the men were pushed to their limit. The book and the film focus primarily on one member, Joe Rantz (Callum Turner, The Last Letter from Your Lover), a homeless boy abandoned by his father after his mother’s death. His desire to be on the team meant a warm bed with the opportunity to stay in school so he could become an engineer, and if that meant he had to endure aching muscles and skin-shredding blisters on his hands, so be it.
It’s a classic tale with a formula we could all do without a fancy calculator. However, we must care about the figures that go into the equation, and Mark L. Smith’s (Vacancy) screenplay never finds the heart behind the characters to get us there. As the team begins their training and works through adversity, we don’t get much more information on anyone in the boat, which is strange considering the film’s title. This poses a considerable problem for Clooney and the overall film because the viewer is stuck for two hours watching a group that we don’t get close to striving for a goal we find little to invest in.
Cinematographer Martin Ruhe has shot the period set film in an extremely digitized format, so the entire movie looks like when your TV has been accidentally flipped to the high-definition settings. Faces look too smooth and waxy, there’s no fine grain to wide shots, which would have greatly helped to give the film a time and place instantly, and in general, there’s a faux tidiness to everything that feels like a computer unfamiliar with history generated it. There’s frighteningly little diversity to be seen, with the few minority characters popping up as insert shots cheering on the team or when minor character Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes) has a brief moment of importance when the US team traveled to Berlin. Even the actor they get to play Hitler is unconvincing.
I usually find these “Dad” movies easy to root for because they are so noble in intent, if predictable in structure. With The Boys in the Boat, I had to keep looking for those moments of respectability because they were few and far between. I wouldn’t go so far or sink so low as to call the film boring, but it suffers from a severe “lack of sustained engagement” because of its dull performances of disappointing script. The racing sequences do create what few thrills are offered, but there’s a lot of movie in between that is interminably hackneyed and clumsy. I’ve already felt composer Alexandre Desplat’s (Unbroken – another “dad” movie based on a book that had an underwhelming big-screen adaptation by an Oscar-winning star) quality waning, but his score for The Boys in the Boat is two steps above random plunks on a piano; like the movie, there’s bizarrely little effort put in with the expectation we should like it anyway. Not on my watch.
As good of an actor as Clooney is, he’s strangely drawn to these slim directing projects set in the past (Leatherheads, The Monuments Men, Suburbicon), but he can’t fully embrace the cinematic vocabulary of that era to bring the viewers back along with him. He tried out a modern (well, futuristic) tale with The Midnight Sky, and while that landed about as well his his previous films, it at least demonstrated some creative dialogue missing from what he’d created before. The Boys in the Boat represents a step back into a detached comfort zone that doesn’t know its audience or their taste level as well as it thinks it does.