George Clooney, you could argue, directs in exactly the way you’d expect from a true Hollywood star. His films are handsomely made, likeable and approachable, yet entirely without risk. He’s largely produced period pieces – save for his 2011 election drama The Ides of March and 2020 environmental sci-fi The Midnight Sky – that frequently engage with political ideas, yet lack the nerve to do so with any real sense of propulsion (and not even with the directness Clooney has shown in his own activism).
There’s a weightlessness, too, to his latest. The Boys in the Boat adapts Daniel James Brown’s 2013 book about the University of Washington men’s rowing team and their journey to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, conducted under the shadow of the Nazi regime. Clooney and his screenwriter, Mark L Smith, tell their story with rousing traditionalism, reinforced by Alexandre Desplat’s idealist score, but little more.
