Some people have levels of strength, grit and determination that challenge credibility, and can only be called heroic.
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Director George Clooney clearly has a soft spot for period sports stories — his 2008 dramedy, Leatherheads, is seriously underrated — and he has a clear winner here. Although both book and film focus on scrappy Joe Rantz (played here by Callum Turner), scripter Mark L. Smith has narrowed the window to the 1935-36 academic year.
Clooney opens with a sweet prologue that echoes the similar “bookending” that Steven Spielberg employed in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan. We then flash back to the mid-1930s, with the United States mired in the Great Depression.
Joe, on his own since age 14, finished high school and somehow managed to get enrolled at the University of Washington. He’s an attentive student, despite living in the remnants of a car, studying by the light of a lantern, and frequently going hungry. Employment has been spotty, and not quite enough to maintain tuition fees.
As this saga begins, he’s given a 14-day notice to pay the balance, or face expulsion.
Best friend Roger Morris (Sam Strike), equally poor and struggling, learns of potential salvation: obtaining a spot on the university rowing team, which would include food, lodging and enough money to handle tuition.
But Joe and Roger are hardly unique; they’re among literally hundreds of young men who show up for tryouts. Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, note-perfect) and Assistant Coach Tom Bolles (James Wolk) calmly explain that the odds are heartbreaking; the one team opening has only eight spots, plus an alternate.
Edgerton masterfully handles Ulbrickson’s initial warning, as he catalogues the degree to which the human body simply wasn’t designed for the amount of punishment inflicted by this sport; it’s a superbly scripted speech, delivered with gently implacable emotion.
Ulbrickson has his own share of troubles. His rowing teams have performed poorly during recent years, and their continuing losses to Cal (UC Berkeley’s) team are particularly galling. He’s given to understand that if things don’t improve, funding may be eliminated.
Tryouts are relentless: a grueling regimen of push-ups, sit-ups, long-distance runs and — of course — rowing. Most applicants can’t get the outrageously tricky rhythm required, with eight men holding one oar each, alternating sides of the boat, front to back.
Composer Alexandre Desplat has fun with these training sequences, backing them with exhilarating, hard-charging orchestral fanfares. Although the music here is upbeat, it doesn’t mask the gravity of the stakes involved; all of these young men are desperate to succeed ... but only nine of them ultimately do.
Aside from Joe and Roger, we also get to know the shy, quiet Don Hume (Jack Mulhern), who proves to have an unexpected sidebar talent; and feisty coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) — the team’s essential 10th man — who proves quite adept at inspirational psychology.
Smith’s script short-shrifts the rest, which is unfortunate. They’re little more than their names: Chuck Day (Thomas Elms), Gordy Adams (Joel Phillimore), Johnny White (Tom Varey), Jim McMillin (Wil Coban) and Shorty Hunt (Bruce Herbelin-Earle). They’re uniformly buff and well-built — certainly credible as rowers — but not granted much personality.
This mesmerizing saga unfolds in three distinct chapters, starting with the build-up to the annual challenge from Cal. This is followed by an even more crucial race in Poughkeepsie, where much better financed Ivy League schools have long dominated the sport; and then the climactic trip to Berlin, for the 1936 Olympics.
The outcome of each match obviously isn’t in doubt — otherwise Brown wouldn’t have written his book, and Clooney wouldn’t have made this film — but the behind-the-scenes details make the results even more miraculous. The team faced far more than racing opponents; they and Ulbrickson also had to deal with hostility from the UW varsity team, which believed itself superior “just because”; snickering derision from Cal athletes; Ivy League snobbery; bad-faith “old money” shenanigans behind the scenes (particularly atrocious); and, well, Nazis.
The racing footage — and there’s plenty — is mesmerizing, and totally believable.
What ultimately emerges is a classic underdog saga: the poor standing up to the rich, speaking power to authority, and never, ever giving up. The latter makes perfect sense; these boys had everything to lose — college placement, career plans — if they failed. Small wonder they pushed themselves so hard.
Smith parallels the sports activities with a slowly developing romance between Joe and a classmate, Joyce (Hadley Robinson), who remembers that he had a crush on her, when both were in fourth grade. The developing relationship is totally old-school, with Turner and Robinson making the most of their shared chemistry: too sweet for words.
Turner’s Joe is a terrific core character, with a gift for expressing much while saying little. It’s easy to see why Brown focused on him, and Turner exemplifies our best qualities: hard-working, uncomplaining, intelligent and sincere. All of this is noticed by Ulbrickson, leading to a strong but unspoken bond between the two.
Peter Guinness also is strong as the calmly wise, Yoda-like George Pocock, soon to become the 20th century’s most famous designer and builder of racing shells; his crucial presence at UW, early in his career, had much to do with what transpires in this story.
Desplat’s orchestral contributions are augmented by telling use of the popular 1921 foxtrot song “Ain’t We Got Fun,” at two pivotal moments involving Don and Bobby.
Perhaps more than anything else, this saga illustrates how obstacles and supposed limits can be surmounted when people work together for the greater good: a message that I’ve no doubt Clooney and Smith intend to be front and center, at a time when cooperation and compromise seem to have lost favor.
That aside, this is simply a swell story, told with panache.
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