Yesterday, Maddy reviewed The Boys in the Boat, a historical sports drama about the 1936 U.S. Olympic rowing team. She was mostly unimpressed:
This movie could have been set at any time, in any place, with any team sport, and had much the same script. What is this movie about? “It’s about the boat.” And what does that represent? [Insert inane platitude here.]
I thought something similar as I left the theater on Christmas Day of last year (when it was released). To make it about a different sport in a different period, not much would really need to be changed aside from the actors. It hit the sports-movie beats fairly predictably. There was even an obligatory cameo from a comically fussy Hitler, as if in the next reel we were going to be asked to buy war bonds.
Maddy is right that the movie’s lack of depth made it a workmanlike affair. Maybe it’s just that my standards have fallen so low for Hollywood these days, but I still found it somewhat impressive that The Boys in the Boat presented, in mostly straightforward and definitely unironic fashion, a patriotic episode from American history, centering on the exploits of young white males.
Certain storytelling shortcuts bothered me more. The Boys in the Boat makes becoming an Olympic-level athlete seem too easy. Yes, there is grueling training that the aspiring competitors must endure. But we get no real sense of what separated the titular boys from the others who tried out. All of them appear to have done so on a lark. In the absence of proper character development, their success seems accidental. This perceived ease also arises from narrative compression. The movie makes it seem like Joe Rantz, the main character, went to the Olympics only a few months after rowing for the first time. He had actually been doing crew since his freshman year in 1934.
A more niche complaint: Many of the action shots of rowing, especially during races, lingered on the parts of the boat where the oars are fixed. Knowledgeable about movies but not about rowing, I was constantly thinking, because of these choices of focus, that something was about to go wrong with one of the oars, but that never occurred. This, as well as some of the more technical defects of the depiction of rowing, bothered one person I attended the movie with who has been around rowing for many years, as an athlete and as a coach.
Finally: I wish I hadn’t looked up what actually happened in the 1936 Olympics before I saw the movie, as I “ruined” the ending for myself. (History is full of spoilers.) But given that we never see the boys lose, as Maddy notes, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised even if I hadn’t. Some of the details of the win were unknown to me, so that helped make The Boys in the Boat an acceptable way to pass a couple of hours.