123 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2023 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
George Clooney adapts the story of the 1936 University of Washington rowing crew that beat the Ivy League elites and rowed its way to the Berlin Olympics. Joe Rantz is broke, abandoned, and living in a half-finished car when he tries out for the boat. The film knows every beat of this story, and so do you.
Joe Rantz is a college student in Depression-era Seattle with no money and no family. He sleeps in an abandoned car and needs a paying job to stay enrolled. The University of Washington rowing program offers room and board to whoever survives tryouts. Rantz earns a seat in the boat and the film follows that crew of working-class kids toward the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This is a true story about labor, class, and a sport that belonged to the rich. The film treats it as an underdog formula and hits every mark the formula requires.
Callum Turner plays Joe Rantz with a guarded reserve that fits a young man who expects everyone to leave. He carries the physical demand of the rowing and keeps the character legible even when the script gives him little interior life. Joel Edgerton plays Coach Al Ulbrickson as a stoic tactician who hides his calculations behind a flat expression. Edgerton finds the tension between a coach who needs to win and a coach who refuses to let the boys see that he cares. Peter Guinness plays boat builder George Pocock as the film’s source of wisdom and delivers his lines about craft and water with a weathered calm. The supporting oarsmen, including Jack Mulhern as Don Hume and Luke Slattery as coxswain Bobby Moch, blend into a unit by design and rarely emerge as individuals.
George Clooney directs in a polished classical mode that smooths every rough edge out of the material. The race sequences are the strongest work in the film. The camera rides low at the waterline and cuts to the rhythm of the oars, and the sound design pulls the creak of the rigging and the gasp of the rowers up over the crowd noise. Mark L. Smith’s script compresses the crew down to a few recognizable types and leans on montage to cover the training that builds them into a team. The period production design renders Depression Seattle and Nazi Berlin in handsome postcard detail. Nothing about the staging surprises, and that is the intent.
The Boys in the Boat works as comfort food. It delivers the swelling music, the slow-motion final stroke, and the validation of the kid nobody believed in. The real history holds harder material about poverty and the propaganda spectacle of the Berlin Games, and the film glances at that material without digging in. Clooney wants to inspire, not to complicate. He makes a competent, sincere film that asks nothing difficult of the audience and gives back exactly what it promises.