The Boys in the Boat review – gentle, forgettable sports drama

Leaning into his reputation as the director behind films that exist purely for your dad to fall asleep watching in his favourite armchair, George Clooney’s latest outing concerns the story of the University of Washington’s rowing team, who beat the odds to become Olympic champions in 1936. While those Olympics are best remembered for Jesse Owens‘ staggering achievements and as an aggressive propaganda event staged by Adolf Hitler, the Washington Huskies won the hearts of their home nation and royally pissed off the Führer by taking home the gold in the men’s eight, beating Italy into second place by .6 of a second.

Based on Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name, The Boys in the Boat focuses primarily on one boy: Joe Rantz, played by a bleach-blonde Callum Turner. A taciturn working-class boy from a small town in Washington, he raised himself from the age of 14 after being left to his own devices by his father, who had remarried. He tries out for the University of Washington’s rowing team because it comes with the promise of accommodation and pay – two things he needs to support his engineering degree. For Rantz, rowing is a means to an end, but for coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) it’s a chance to show that talent and determination can beat out privilege.

To get to the Olympics, the team will have to beat out their more monied Ivy League rivals. It’s difficult to make this a tense plot point given that we know the Washington team did beat them, and indeed did win Olympic gold, so screenwriter Mark L. Smith (who also wrote The Midnight Sky) opts to focus more on the men themselves, primarily Rantz but also the shy Don Hume (Jack Mulhern) and the disenfranchisement of working classic Americans during the Great Depression. Turner brings a steely determination to Rantz, but also a hidden softness that unfurls as he spends time with shipwright George Yeomans Pocock (Peter Guinness). If anything, he does seem a little too virtuous – the inevitable moment of tension late in the film comes when Rantz is too stubborn to admit how much the team means to him, and Ulbrickson doubts his commitment as a result.

It’s a straightforward story, told in Clooney’s increasingly straightforward filmmaking style. No flourishes, nothing too challenging, just lots of nice shots of strapping young men rowing big boats down open bodies of water, and a yearning for the good old days, when young Americans pulled themselves up by their bootstraps instead of sitting around tweeting about the oppressive nature of global capitalism and how decades of aggressive individualism and exceptionalism have ruined our hopes of ever living a good life.

But I digress! There’s much made of the rowers’ determination, and how they bonded as a group, getting over their petty differences to become lifelong friends and a piece of American sporting history. The film does gloss over the fact that after the Olympics, all the men pursued other careers due to the nature of a practice where money does substantially impact your ability to succeed, and the inclusion of some Hitler reaction shots during the climactic Olympic race came off more comical than Clooney likely intended, but as a fairytale about the power of grit and hard work, it passes the time. There’s just nothing here to cement The Boys in the Boat as anything other than a sort of interesting story made in a competent but uncomplicated manner.