Title: The Boys in the Boat

Describe This Movie In One Blazing Saddles Quote:

SHERIFF BART: And now, for my next impression: Jesse Owens!

Brief Plot Synopsis: Could be a winner boy, you move quite well.

Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film: 1.5 Michael Jordan Hitler mustaches out of 5.
Tagline: "Based on the incredible true story."

Better Tagline: "Think Oxford Blues, but with slightly less jingoism."

Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: In the midst of the Great Depression [How great was it?], University of Washington student Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) decides to seek employment of a sort on the college rowing team headed by coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton). Against all odds, Ulbrickson molds these ragtag youths into a team capable of not just competing with the Ivy League, but at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Take a look at them now.
"Critical" Analysis: Daniel James Brown's 2013 bestseller The Boys in the Boat was a terrific story about — among other things — overcoming the hardships of the Depression, uniting for a common cause, and reminding Americans what we're capable of when we put our minds to it. Brown managed to combine all that into a gripping narrative that was also part history lesson, part technical primer about the sport of rowing.

Leave it Hollywood to fuck all that up.

As films go, George Clooney's adaptation looks and sounds good. Reuniting with his Midnight Sky team (writer Mark L. Smith, cinematographer Martin Ruhe, composer Alexandre Desplat) Clooney is a perfectly adept director, and Boys in the Boat is chock full of sweeping crane shots and tense rowing scenes (as tense as they can be to someone who doesn't know what the hell's going on, anyway). All of that is perfectly fine.

So what's the problem? Let's start with "fine." Ruhe's sepia-toned photography is "fine." Desplat's triumphant-in-all-the-right-places score is "fine." Edgerton is "fine" as the taciturn coach who defies conventional wisdom by taking his "B" team to Olympics. Turner is "fine" as the struggling student who's also rather buff for the 1930s. Hadley Robinson is "fine" as Joyce, Joe's love interest who has a pretty inexplicable inferiority complex.

Fine is all well and good when you're making a by the numbers sports movie. The story of this team, however, deserved more, and what Clooney serves up is a portentous slobs vs. snobs with the patina of cinematic legitimacy.

There's also some not so subtle commentary on money in collegiate sports, with Harvard and Yale pulling out all the stops at the big regatta to defeat those pesky rowers from Delta Hou...er, the University of Washington. The Boys in the Boat hits all the marks: the training montage(s), the hero's tragic backstory, and the insomniac coach who comes up with a winning strategy so crazy it just might work.

The economic incentive for Joe and the other for joining the Washington rowing team is a micro example of the situation facing the U.S. in the '30s, but the Great Depression mostly serves as chance for historically accurate costuming. The tension between Joe and his absentee father is also visited briefly and pretty much never addressed again.

Any movie about historical events, especially those of the sporting variety, is going to leave things out/condense timelines in order to make for a coherent film-length narrative (see also The Iron Claw), but what Clooney leaves out or abbreviates — how Ulbrickson hit upon the right combination of rowers, Joe's off season as a laborer alongside several of his teammates, how critical Don Hume's illness in Berlin really was — are all glossed over or omitted entirely.

Clooney had the opportunity to make something remarkable, but instead succumbed to the most cliched sports movie approach possible.

The Boys in the Boat is in theaters today.