As sports go, rowing is not a natural fit for the big screen. Aside from the fact that small boats moving not-very-fast – about 14mph at the absolute top level – in a straight line down a river isn’t especially exciting to look at, it is also not a milieu known for flamboyant, dysfunctional-but-genius individuals. You have never had and never will have a Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods or Usain Bolt of rowing because in rowing, more than in any other sport, teamwork makes the dream work.
Visually George Clooney, who directs, certainly does his best to sex up the races in his adaptation of Daniel James Brown’s book The Boys In The Boat: Nine Americans And Their Epic Quest For Gold At The 1936 Berlin Olympics. There are lavish overhead shots so you can see who’s creeping ahead. Flashes of oars bashing loudly against rowlocks. And plenty of close-ups on the masks the coxes wore during this period, which are basically tin loudhailers strapped tightly to their faces and thus look really cool, like a steampunk Bane mask.
The story, too, is ostensibly a good, uplifting one. We join a bunch of dirt poor Seattle, Washington students – our lead, Callum Turner as Joe Rantz, is sleeping in the back of a car – who only try out for the rowing team because it means they get free accommodation.
Of course, under the stewardship of Joel Edgerton’s obsessive, down-on-his-luck coach Al Ulbrickson, they end up being brilliant: beating all the poshos at all the bigger universities and then travelling to (Nazi) Germany to, against the odds, win the ultimate prize.
The problem is that that basically… is that. Turner – who you’ll remember from BBC’s The Capture, and possibly the Fantastic Beasts franchise – is very charismatic, but it’s not an especially meaty role. There’s a love story involving his childhood sweetheart, some bonding with the old guy who makes the boats, one half-fight with one of the other boys and the inevitable tumultuous backstory, but none really go anywhere much.
Similarly, the worst thing that might happen to Ulbrickson is that he might not get to coach the team next season. But he has a lovely home life and not really that much to worry about beyond rowing.
As for the other boys in the boat? Well, generically handsome they may be, but they are also sorely, sorely lacking in character traits. One of them plays piano quite well and doesn’t speak much, which is about as complex as any of them get. This is probably all accurate because, as I said above, rowing is not a place for flamboyant, dysfunctional-but-genius individuals. But unfortunately, good films are.
