The Boys In The Boat Review: George Clooney's Sports Drama Is Standard-Issue
If George Clooney weren't such a charismatic actor, his milquetoast directing might not inspire such derision. It's been well over a decade since he sunk his teeth into a meaty part, yet his ambitions on the other side of the camera have ranged from passable to terrible. "The Boys in the Boat" ranks in the upper echelon of Clooney's directorial efforts, if only because that's a rather low bar.
This is sturdy, simple studio filmmaking at its least offensive. Clooney executes a familiar underdog sports narrative with technical competence and some measure of engaging action. It's aiming for less than his last foray into period athletics, 2008's "Leatherheads," which also tried to shoehorn in screwball comedy elements alongside football competition. But "The Boys in the Boat" achieves more by using a more vibrant palette to color within predictable lines.
Just one boy
Despite the plural "boys" in the title, Clooney's film only has interest in one boy in the boat. That's Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a student at the University of Washington struggling to scrap together the money for his tuition. Desperate for any gig that might help him cover the costs, Rantz takes a flyer on tryouts for the school's rowing team despite having no experience in the sport. It does not take a genius to guess what comes next for Rantz.
It might not be surprising if you couldn't pick Callum Turner from a lineup of his British millennial actor peers like Josh O'Connor and George MacKay. (He was not well-served by the "Fantastic Beasts" series.) But Rantz proves a fine fit for Turner, whose imposing frame and quiet brooding make him a perfect embodiment of the Greatest Generation's brand of masculinity. He's not blank, just appropriately stoic for the time.
And the more "The Boys in the Boat" fills in his backstory, from being orphaned to providing for himself since his teen years, the more it makes sense that Rantz's real-world resilience would carry over into the boat. The film does not always give Turner the best material to work with off the water, including some residual family trauma that manifests in obvious ways and a romantic relationship for which he has no vocabulary of affection. Yet the small grace notes Turner locates in his character's connection to the engineering of the boats give the film its closest brush with greatness.
Mark L. Smith's screenplay for "The Boys in the Boat," adapted from Daniel James Brown's bestselling book of the same name, does not grant the same level of insight into the lives of Rantz's seven teammates rowing alongside him. It misses the opportunity to be a true ensemble film like "Miracle," another comparable tale of amateur American athletes achieving Olympic glory together. The other Washington athletes are a largely indistinguishable mass in the film, apart from perhaps coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery), who brings a needed energy jolt with his cajoling in the boat.
A medal for their mettle
Under the tough coaching of Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), which emphasizes the mental as well as physical strength needed to go the distance, the Washington junior varsity team begins to excel. That's right, junior varsity. From second fiddle at their own school to gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is quite the Cinderella story in its own right, and that improbable rise makes for a decently thrilling watch.
But Clooney keeps insisting this team means something more as "The Boys in the Boat" marches towards the inevitable triumph. Brown's book might have proved the case that these working-class rowers became the pride of their nation during a difficult period of economic depression. The film does not because Smith's screenplay tells us without selling us. Some gallingly glib cutaways to a cartoonish Hitler watching the gold medal race do not count as elevating the stakes.
Clooney's direction does not show it, either. When the rowers fully sync, they should glide along the water in a way that is "more poetry than sport," Ulbrickson states. "The Boys in the Boat" never finds that artfulness to their athleticism, either in depicting their actual physical exertion or in their emotional struggle. Not even a plucky Alexandre Desplat score can push it into that ethereal realm. The results tell the story of the team's brilliance, not the filmmaking.
So try as it might for that additional political heft, this is ultimately just a standard-issue sports movie. Clooney mostly contains the fallout from that extra ambition faltering because he manages to provide that baseline level of expected inspiration from the genre. The film tastes like the cinematic equivalent of Clooney's tequila brand Casamigos. That is to say, "The Boys in the Boat" goes down smoothly, if somewhat unremarkably.
/Film rating: 6 out of 10