The Boys in the Boat tells the story of the eight-man junior varsity rowing crew from the University of Washington who, against all odds, made it all the way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.  As you may recall, this was the same Olympics where Jesse Owens won four gold medals and single-handedly dealt a crushing blow to the Nazi belief in Aryan supremacy.  I wasn’t aware that the American rowing crew also took home the gold at that same event, but since the movie establishes that it’s an inspirational sports movie from the outset, I was certain that they would triumph in the end.  The only questions remaining were who these boys are and how they would get to that point.

The story of the boys is uncomplicated to a fault and proudly uses all of the inspirational sports movie trademarks (cliches).  First there’s the hero, a plucky underdog with a hardscrabble origin who is destined for greatness.  While all of the boys in the boat are of limited means, Joe Rantz (Callum Turner) is undeniably the poorest among them.  Abandoned by his father when he was fourteen, Joe somehow managed to grow up into a handsome and intelligent young man.  (He’s also tall and blond.)  Even though he calls a broken-down truck his home, he’s managed to find a way to pay for college.  How he managed to accomplish this would have made for an interesting movie all by itself.  Unfortunately, the movie isn’t concerned with the backstory of Joe, or any of the characters involved for that matter.

Next up is the crusty coach who sees the potential in the boys and pushes them to achieve the impossible.  Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) is not prone to inspirational speeches and barely delivers a convincing one before the big race.  Up to that point he treats the boys as a drill sergeant would a group of recruits.  He pushes them to their breaking point and–after they catch their breath, pushes them some more.  Ulbrickson is alternatively gruff and honest towards everyone else, a reflection of having his dreams dashed by the better-funded University of California teams time and again.  If it weren’t for the love and understanding of his beautiful wife Hazel (Courtney Henggeler) he would be a full-time cynic.  (Whenever she’s not enough, he also has an impressive view from his front porch to fall back on.)

Given how testosterone-heavy a movie like this one is, there must be an impossibly cute girl to prop up the hero when he’s down.  Joyce (Hadley Robinson) notices Joe during a lecture one day and instantly remembers him as the boy who had a crush on her in the fourth grade.  Like Reese Witherspoon from her Legally Blonde heyday, she’s a perky ray of sunshine that forces you to like her simply by smiling at you.  I can’t fault her for becoming mooney whenever she’s near Joe, but the way she throws herself at him is comical.  At one point I expected her to show up wearing a sign stating “I’m Available!”, just to be sure Joe understood, well, you know.

Lastly, every story of underdogs requires a mystic.  As a lifelong maker of the boats, George Pocock (Peter Guinness) alternates between providing sage advice to Coach Ulbrickson and providing a healthy outlet for Joe’s anger.  There’s nothing like rubbing whale oil across a bow to calm a man down.  Pocock’s insight is always so spot on that I wondered why he wasn’t the coach, but he seems content with his place in the order of things.

After Joe and his buddy Roger Morris (Sam Strike) sign up for the rowing team, the movie fixates nearly exclusively on episodes of the boys training and racing.  There are scenes of the boys practicing, followed by the Coach shaking his head and telling them to do it again until they get it right.  There are shots galore of paddles splashing in the water, boys grimacing, arm muscles straining and so on.  There are so many closeups of paddles clanging within eyelets that I fully expected to see one of them cracking at least once–and was disappointed when it never happened.  

The majority of the movie consists of training sequences, with the three big races spliced between them.  Occasionally the movie will hint that it will tell us about some of the other characters.  In one scene the boys are shocked when Don (Jack Mulhern), the lead rower, reveals that he can play piano.  “What can’t he do?” one of them marvels.  They proceed to force him on stage at the big dance, where he plays the same song as before (“Ain’t we got fun?”)  Does he know any other songs, or just that one?  What else can Don do?  Later, when the boys arrive in Berlin, I wondered if the movie would suddenly steal the plot of Chariots of Fire and reveal that one of the boys is Jewish.  (Nope.)  There’s a bit of last-minute concern when Don becomes very sick.  Would he have to sit out their trials, or even worse, the big race?  (Nope.)

The similarities between The Boys in the Boat and Seabiscuit are undeniable.  In addition to both being depression era sports stories, they feature similar characters (down on their luck athlete, tough love coach, trainer/guru) working within the same plot structure (train, race, win, repeat).  What separates the two is how they address character development and historical context.  Seabiscuit devoted ample time to both, to the point where the successes became exclamation points in the overall story.  Boys, on the other hand, provides only cursory introductions and barely acknowledges the time and place.  Instead, it focuses its attention on the physical aspects of crew racing, with director George Clooney capturing every moment of every race with fastidious detail.  He also loves shots of the boats gliding across the water and includes a lot of them, using as many angles as possible.  While Clooney’s approach does succeed in making me feel like I was in the boat with the crew, it comes at the expense of the characters.  They wind up being little more than simple sketches of the actual people involved.  As for context, Boys offers little that acknowledges the depression itself or even the rise of Nazi Germany.  The underlying conflict starts out as the poor boys versus the rich boys, and pivots to the brave Americans versus the scheming Germans.  I was surprised that all the movie had to say about Hitler’s Germany is that they bent the rules in order to guarantee victory.  Nevertheless, I was entertained enough by the movie enough to overlook its flaws.  Even though I knew from the beginning how the movie would end, I found myself rooting the boys.  Callum Turner and Hadley Robinson were appealing as “Hobo Joe” and his determined girlfriend Joyce.  As for the adults in the room, I liked Joel Edgerton’s stern resoluteness as the coach and Peter Guinness’ sage boat maker.  The Boys in the Boat is predictable, but it’s entertaining, wholesome fun.  Mildly Recommended.