George Clooney has been a charming and dapper Anglophile presence on the awards circuit this season while promoting the new movie he’s directed, some of which was shot not far from where he lives near Henley-on-Thames. So it’s sad to report that his film clunks harder than redwood. It is a stodgy and sententious varsity-sports underdog drama from the Depression era, a bit like his 1920s American football film Leatherheads, from 2008, but minus the comedy. Weirdly, it is as if this earnest but perfunctorily imagined film is always ordering us to feel nostalgic and sentimental about a time and place of which no one involved can have any real memory or feeling.
It tells the true story of how a gutsy crew of nine guys from the humble University of Washington battled to compete for Olympic rowing gold at the Berlin games in 1936, shrugging off Ivy League snobs and Nazi cheats along the way. Screenwriter Mark L Smith (who co-scripted Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant) has adapted Daniel James Brown’s bestselling book of the same title, and Clooney directs. Joel Edgerton plays gruff and taciturn coach Al Ulbrickson, who takes the sensational decision to take his junior crew of young talents to the Olympics rather than the more seasoned seniors, and then rages at the sneering obstructionists among the US rowing authorities who would prefer the Waspy east coast bluebloods to compete for America rather than his blue-collar team who are actually better at rowing. (You might remember the meanie Winklevoss twins from David Fincher’s The Social Network in a later era: entitled snobs who learned their habits of superiority in a rowing crew at Harvard.)
