Movie Review: The Boys in the Boat
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
There’s a gripping story to be told in The Boys in the Boat. Daniel James Brown’s best-seller gained acclaim for depicting how nine Depression-era boys defied the odds and inspired a nation rowing crew for the U.S. in the 1936 Olympics. It’s a tale rife with optimism and intrigue – all of which director George Clooney siphons away in this bland, rote adaptation.
It’s the middle of the Depression when Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) decides to go out for Washington’s rowing team as a way to pay for his college education. Most of the young men on the team, coached by Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), are there not because they have a passion for crew but because they simply want the paycheck. While they’re a ramshackle lot to begin with, over time the JV crew team outshines the varsity squad and eventually wins a spot in the Olympics in Berlin, where they command the world’s attention – and Hitler’s ire.
Brown’s book goes into more detail about the members of the team, the social impact of the depression and the political intrigue surrounding the Olympics. Clooney, working from a perfunctory script by Mark Smith, does not. He instead delivers a similarly perfunctory sports drama with any nuance or personality sanded away and any suspense drained. It’s a handsomely filmed but dramatically lifeless time-filler, a movie designed to be watched while folding laundry or to play in the background while the family eats a holiday meal. The problem isn’t that it’s good or bad; the bigger issue is the The Boys in the Boat is nothing at all.
As an actor, Clooney is one of the most charismatic people on the planet. And, as a director, he hasn’t shied away from his personal interests or idiosyncratic films; Good Night and Good Luck is one of the better films about modern media, and even if Monuments Men and Ides of March are lacking, it’s easy to see why the director was drawn to them. Even Suburbicon, a whiff of a movie, allowed him to take a stylistic swing. But with its stultifying pace, handsome but lifeless cinematography and a formulaic sports story that feels crafted by AI, The Boys in the Boat is the first of his films to feel void of any personality or character, so bland and inert that it might be the first movie to leap past Dad Movie and achieve Grandpa Movie status.
The film tells its story in very broad strokes. Joe’s social status is conveyed quickly by watching him leave a tent city to head to class and a few perfunctory discussions about paying tuition; it’s largely forgotten for the rest of the film, except for an anticlimactic meeting with the father who abandoned him. There are some perfunctory scenes of the team not gelling when they first get into the boats, but the requisite montages get them into ship-shape quickly. All the women, including Joe’s girlfriend and Al’s wife, are just there to smile and be supportive, and any obstacles are overcome in the space of a scene, including Joe leaving the team briefly prior to the climax and a sick oarsmen whose illness the film treats as a major malady but, in the end, recovers after sitting by the toilet for a scene.
Callum Turner and Hadley Robinson in “The Boys in the Boat.” © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.
None of it is badly filmed or acted. Turner does what he can with a thin, stereotypical character, and Edgerton barks out commands and delivers inspirational speeches just fine. The rowing sequences have energy and are beautifully shot, even if they’re largely empty of much suspense. And the sports formula is reliable enough that it’s not completely without momentum. But there’s never much reason for its existence. The film’s back half largely takes place in Berlin for the Olympics, but the film is uninterested in digging too much into the racial and political upheaval of the time, settling instead for a cringe-inducing Jesse Owens walk-on and more Hitler reaction shots than one may expect from a sports drama. The ending is never in doubt and the film walks off the screen with a final line that elicits eye rolls and groans.
While there’s nothing wrong with an inoffensive, competently made sports drama, the utter blandness of The Boys in the Boat does an immense disservice to the real men who the story purports to be about. Aside from Joe, all the characters are relegated to the background or given one identifying characteristic – the loud mouth, the shy kid who plays piano well, the singer. When the team is passing a victory laurel across the boat near the film’s end, it’s the longest the camera settles on many of the supporting characters in the entire film.
There are worse sports movies that The Boys in the Boat, and probably worse World War II-era films. But that might be the film’s biggest problem. It’s not bad enough to get angry about or good enough to settle for “fine.” It’s a movie that just floats in the water, too dull to care about one way or another. These boys deserved better.
