The Boys in the Boat

The true story behind the movie is a mighty good one. Soft spoilers upcoming, so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you don’t want almost one hundred year old history to give away the plot of the movie. A bunch of working class young men from the University of Washington beat all the teams from all the traditionally upper class schools with long traditions of rowing like Harvard and Cal. That earns them a berth in the Olympics representing the United States, where they win gold against all odds. Oh, and that Olympic Games was the infamous 1936 games hosted in Nazi Germany.

Somehow, despite such a strong story for the film, the resulting movie is decidedly mediocre. There isn’t anything in particular that is glaringly bad about it, but there isn’t anything particularly good about it either. It just sort of… is. There is something just a little bit off that keeps it from being as good as it should be, like a painting where a thin sheen of grime has obscured its intended vibrancy. The visuals are fine, but more serviceable than artistic. The acting is a tad dull, but is offset by the occasional splashes of genuine humanity. The dramatic moments and the rise and fall of the action are always quite effective. I was always interested to see what happened next and never felt a desire to turn it off or put something else on. The result is a film that is, sadly, only noteworthy in its mediocrity.

There were a few places where I think obvious improvements could have been made that would have perhaps elevated the film to a higher level. For starters, the film is built with a framing device. In what I can only see as an homage to Saving Private Ryan, the film uses an old man in both of the book ends, with editing to imply that the main point of view character among the rowers is that same man at an earlier stage in his life. I found this whole element completely unnecessary. Unlike in Saving Private Ryan, it didn’t really add anything to the story by way of establishing tone, character, or narrative weight with the opening, nor did it offer any kind of tidy bow to wrap up the story, themes, or character arcs with the final sequence. The more I think about it, the more I simply don’t understand why it was included at all.

The other place I think is primed for improvement is in the characterization of the team beyond just the main character. In Chariots of Fire, also about a team of olympians, you really feel you know the team and you feel for their triumphs and their shortcomings, especially the main two runners. The Boys in the Boat follows a lot of similar story beats, like the politics around the Washington boys not having the money to get to Germany mirroring the politics around the devout christian running on a Sunday, yet in Chariots of Fire we know so much more about the family history, religious convictions, and personal struggles of those involved. In The Boys in the Boat, we know that the main character is so poor he lives out of a car and joined the rowing team simply because the university gave every crew team member an accompanying job and that his dad abandoned him in his early teens. We don’t really know anything about anyone else on the team. So when one of them gets sick, or when they have a fight about class or money and it messes up the team dynamics for a time, they feel like conflicts of the story or challenges for the protagonist to overcome, not conflicts of character that make us feel like humanity and reality of the story.

Neither of those weaknesses, the extraneous framing device or the lack of three dimensionality to the full cast of characters, really make it a bad movie, or even a mediocre one, on their own. Rather, there is simply a layer of averageness over everything that makes me wish this inspirational story had been given to a more expert craftsman than George Clooney, whose directorial talents have, so far, proven to be journeyman at best.

Would Recommend: If you are looking for an inspirational sports movie and don’t mind if it fails to achieve excellence.

Would Not Recommend: If you are hoping for the pinnacle of sports entertainment.