Everybody loves an Underdog Story. When they happen to be true it makes them even more compelling. George Clooney has directed a film that takes the underdog motif and uses the 1936 Olympics as a way to engage the audience in a rooting interest. The rowing team at the University of Washington was a consistent loser to the University of California team for 20 years, but the coach at Washington found eight men who could pull together and overcome their tradition of losing to become winners. The story however does not stop with a success against a local rival. There is also the little guy against the entrenched forces, the rich and well-off against the poor and struggling, and eventually Western democracy against Nazi totalitarianism.
Clooney seems to have an affinity for historical settings, three of his best have fallen into that category. I think the film “Monuments Men” is his best work, but that's not to undermine “Good Night and Good Luck “ which was another piece set after WWII. He also did a quite good job with a football film set in the early days of the NFL. So it appears that the Depression era United States is a palette that he feels comfortable painting from. The visualizations of the era are authentic, in fact it is a little disconcerting that the shanty town at the beginning of the film is labeled Seattle, but the year 1936 could easily be replaced with 2023. The idea that widespread homelessness accounted for much of the trauma of the 1930s is a little depressing when we look at contemporary times. Maybe we'll get lucky and some extraordinary story will grow out of these times. For now we have the story of the 1936 Washington Huskies eight-man crew.
Actor Joel Edgerton is nominally the lead, but he is supported by several actors that you will probably not recognize. The story does require that the rowers work as a team and that may be one of the reasons that there is not an individual story for everyone. For the most part we get entry into these events through the experience of a single man who is struggling to work his way through college and takes up rowing simply to be able to earn a living and pay for school. I'm not sure if the NCAA existed in this time era, but it sure looks like some of the boosters would be violating what used to be the rules of College athletics, at least before NIL.
The real main character is Joe Rantz, who is trying to get through college after having been abandoned by his family at age 14. There are others on the team who have gone through similar struggles but the focus here is really on the athletic event and the hard work that it takes for a team to truly become excellent. So except for a love story and a brief callback to the past, even Rantz's story is limited to the team.
Edgerton as the coach is relentless in finding ways for the team to mesh. As entertainment a movie like this can't really be an instructional film on how the sport of rowing works, but we get enough detail and we see a few examples that let us know how each person's behavior and skill contributes to the team effort. In addition we get a little bit of personal story about the coach and his struggles to keep the team going in the face of limited success and budget shortfalls, and Joe Rantz and his romantic relationship with a coed at the University. Neither of these side paths takes up much time, which is a good thing because we have at least three major competitions that provide plenty of drama.
Obviously the team manages to be successful so they can end up in Germany for the 1936 Olympics. So the outcome of some of those contests is a foregone conclusion, but director Clooney, like most people who make these films, has found a way to make those kinds of foregone conclusions entertaining and suspenseful. It helps that we got some details about how the crew develops a strategy and in particular how this group, who are actually the JV team at the University, managed to be a force to be reckoned with. I assume that it is relatively accurate when it comes to the way this event was covered by the media. I know that in contemporary times you're not going to get 100,000 people showing up for a crew race between college teams. But in 1936 the world was a different place, Sports occupied a preeminent place in the culture because there were limited entertainment alternatives, and because it was radio friendly. Maybe the radio friendly thing is the thing that draws Clooney to a story like this.
I'm not familiar enough with the story to say if all of the drama that takes place at the Olympics was in fact historically accurate, but I can say it felt authentic. The showdown at the Olympics is the major set piece of the movie, and it requires some elaborate production design, multiple teams representing different countries to be portrayed on screen, and a special guest appearance by Adolf Hitler himself.
As inspiring as it is to see other nations challenging the Third Reich on the field of sports, the emotional high point for me came earlier when the team had to find a way to finance their way to the Olympics. After having struggled to qualify it seems that only Elite schools would be able to go because they had the financial resources to do so. The University of Washington team had to find what would be a substantial sum of money in order to make the trip. It is in this section of the film that real sportsmanship is demonstrated by somebody who has only been a very tangential part of the story, and in fact would be classified as an antagonist. At least until that moment when we all choke up at the gesture that is made by someone who understands what sports is supposed to be about.
It was a little curious that the actress Hadley Robinson who appears as the romantic interest in this film, was in the film we saw last night "Anyone But You”. Congratulations to her for having two films that open in the same week. That is fairly unusual and is usually an indication that an actress is on the cusp of a breakthrough. The Romantic subplot is not overdone, but it does help give us something to focus on other than the grinding preparation of the boat and team.
I found the movie quite fulfilling, it touched me in an emotional way at a couple of points, and I learned a lot more about the eight man crew and the sport of rowing than I ever expected to know. Although the events occurred nearly a hundred years ago, I think the story still resonates because we all love underdogs, we admire sports, and in our heart we want the good guys to win.
