‘The Boys in the Boat’ offers plenty of suspense and drama, even for those who already know the Spokane rower’s story
The year 2013 saw publication of Daniel James Brown’s nonfiction book bearing a long and involved title: “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.”
It became a literary bestseller. And anyone who has read it knows just how cinematic the story is.
Not to mention how incredible. The fact that a crew of working-class rowers from the University of Washington was able to overcome obstacles that appeared insurmountable begs the imagination. I remember thinking at the time, “If this were a movie, no one would believe it.”
Yet now someone has made the movie: the actor-turned-director George Clooney. Working from a script by Mark L. Smith, Clooney has given us a film that adheres – mostly – to the facts … and still seems like a fantasy.
The facts are this: The crew of rowers, all guys working their way through UW during the height of the Depression, faced a tough task. Even under the tutelage of their demanding coach, Al Ubrickson (Joel Edgerton), they strained to come together as the single entity required of all good eight-man crews (the ninth man is the coxswain).
Even when they did show promise, they had to prove it by facing a crew from the University of California Berkeley, the West Coast’s best. Then they had to face the premier East Coast boats, led by well-funded Ivy League schools.
When after all that, and it appeared that their Olympics dream could be a reality, they still had to find a way to pay for their passage to Berlin. It was only when the citizens of Seattle, and racing fans elsewhere, chipped in a dollar here, a quarter there, that they managed.
But even then their struggle was only beginning. In the Olympic finals, they faced not just the world’s best crews but a boisterous pro-German crowd led by Adolph Hitler himself. Add to that a poor racing position, a seriously ill teammate and even a near-disastrous late start and … well, if you’ve read the book, you know what happens.
Even if you do know, though, Clooney manages to maintain a surprising level of suspense. It helps that screenwriter Smith deleted much of what Brown’s book covers in depth. He uses narrative shorthand, for example, to portray the hard-times life story of the book and film’s protagonist, Spokane-born Joe Rantz (Callum Turner).
Clooney also avoids most of the Holocaust harbingers that the Nazis tried to hide from the world’s media attending the 1936 Berlin Games. Most of all, the sweeping musical score by two-time Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat helps Clooney boost the energy any time it threatens to fade.
As for the cast, Edgerton turns in his typically competent acting job as Ulbrickson, while Hadley Robinson is terminally cute as the woman who attracts Rantz’s eye (and vice-versa). British-born Turner is perfect as Rantz, emblematic of the tersely worded, mostly stoic men of his generation.
In the tradition of great sporting movies, “The Boys in the Boat” may not rank among the likes of such fictional works as “Field of Dreams” or “Rocky.”
But the fact that it, like the Olympic hockey film “Miracle,” is based on real events makes all the difference. As has been proven time and again, truth may be harder to believe than fiction, but that doesn’t make it any less dramatic.
Even when it plays out on a movie screen.