WARNING: SPOILERS

“The Boys in the Boat” is better than its 57% Rotten Tomatoes critics score but not as good as its 97% Rotten Tomatoes audience score. It’s a 65 percenter. It’s OK. I enjoyed watching it. I was moved a few times. I wanted to be moved more.

And not as good as the book, of course.

If you’d asked me when I’d read Daniel James Brown’s account of the University of Washington eight-man crew team that took on California, the east coast elites, and then the world in 1936, I would’ve guessed five years ago. It’s been 10. The book was published in 2013, and I probably read it that year or the next. I actually met Brown, who, per his author bio, “lives outside Seattle,” at the Port Townsend Film Festival in Sept. 2014. They’d asked him to host the showing of a favorite movie and he’d gone with … wait for it … “Breaking Away,” one of my all-time favorites. How could I not attend? It’s easy to see why the author of “Boys in the Boat” might choose “Breaking Away,” too. Both concern a team of young, working-class men who band together to win a race against incredible odds. I believe the announcer of the Little 500 even says something like that: One man may be exceptional … etc. etc. It takes a team.

In “Boat,” the teamwork requires an almost mystical precision.

About the boat
I don’t get some of the storytelling decisions by (I assume) director George Clooney, screenwriter Mark L. Smith, and probably suits at MGM or whatever suits own MGM. Maybe it was a matter of time and money? Those old standbys. Not having enough of either.

Why bookend it with an elderly Joe Rantz in the 1970s watching a nondescript crew team—as well as his own grandson in a one-man boat—dealing with the wakes created by a big loud motorboat? That’s not nearly as poignant as Brown’s own prologue about meeting the elderly Rantz, realizing the story he has to tell, and saying he’d like to write about it. Because it leads to this: 

Joe grasped my hand again and said he’d like that, but then his voice broke once more and he admonished me gently, “But not just about me. It has to be about the boat.”

I mean, that’s everything right there.

In the film, when we return to the 1930s, we see young Joe Rantz (Callum Turner, hunky) struggling to survive in a Hooverville in Seattle in 1936. I had two immediate thoughts:

1. The Hoovervilles of 1936 sure look like the homeless encampments of today.
2. Wait, 1936? And he’s not on the team yet?

In the book, and in life, Joe Rantz was actually recruited by Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) from Roosevelt High School in 1933. Joe wasn’t thinking college until the offer came. That’s why he went. Then he and the freshman class of the 1933-34 crew team did amazing things. They rose and fell. They struggled. It took awhile to get in sync. That doesn’t happen overnight. 

In the movie it kinda does. In the movie, Rantz and the others join the team—to have a place to live and maybe some meals—and within a six-month span take over the world. It's as if the Beatles didn't need Hamburg or the Cavern Club. It's as if they didn't need their 10,000 hours.

I get truncating history for a two-hour film but here they also truncate the drama. The real drama, the real story, is how Joe has to unlearn what his own backstory had taught him about life: that he can’t rely on others. His mother died when he was young, his father remarried, his stepmom didn’t like him; and when his father decided to move the family to another state to find work, they didn’t take him along. As the car pulled out, his half-siblings were like, “Where’s Joe? Where’s Joe?” Left to fend for himself, kids. He was 14.

But he fended. He put himself through high school and got the college gig. Then he had to be part of a team. He had to trust—implicitly trust—and that took awhile. And we get some of that struggle in the movie, but it shows up oddly, and it’s intercut with a romance with a pretty girl (Hadley Robinson), who flirts with him like he’s George Clooney.

All of this comes to a head before the Poughkeepsie Regatta. In Seattle, Joe sees his old man again, who's returned to Seattle but still wants nothing to do with his son. Maybe before he saw Joe as the cast-off, and now he sees himself as the cast-off, with Joe getting his picture in the newspaper and all, or maybe he just feels way too guilty, but he says he’s fine with each of them going their own way. Does this gnaw at Joe? Anew? On the train platform, the pretty girl tells him she loves him, and he seems to not hear, but then returns to kiss her. So good, right? Except on the train, teammate Chuck Day (Thomas Elms) kids him with an unflattering nickname. Cottonwood Joe? Palooka Joe? No. Something that implies he’s poor. And they come to blows. But then Chuck apologizes and says his family only has money because they steal it. So he’s the same as Joe except he steals while Joe is honest. It’s a nice apology. So good, right? No, this is exactly when Joe goes out of rhythm with the team and is nearly replaced at the 11th hour. But then we get a version of that great scene from “An Officer and a Gentleman (also Pac NW), in which Richard Gere breaks down and admits he’s got nowhere else to go. That’s Joe to Coach Ulbrickson. But it’s mild. It’s everyday. It doesn’t really land. 

The advice that turned Joe toward the right path came from George Pocock (Peter Guinness), the man who built the shells the UW team races in, whose designs were ahead of their time, and who was in fact a kind of father-figure to Joe. They have a few scenes together. These also don’t quite land the way they should.

The losing of self
As the movie progresses, what is the conflict? Where is the drama? Basically this:

• Will Joe get kicked out of school or make the team? He makes the team!
• Will the kids beat Cal? They do!
• Is Coach’s decision to elevate the JV squad a good one? It is!
• Can Joe rejoin the team? He can!
• Will they beat those east coast elites? They will!
• Will they beat the Nazi bastards despite a bullshit lane assignment and a sickness befalling their strong, silent anchor Don Hume (Jack Mulhern)? Yes! In a literal photo finish!

Most of the above actually happened, but, again, liberties are taken.  Don Hume’s sickness was respiratory rather than flu-like. Coach elevated the JV squad, but at the beginning of the 1934-35 season and then snatched Poughkeepsie away from them. (If the boys are eight hearts beating as one, Coach Ulbrickson sometimes comes off as arrhythmia.)

Maybe there’s not enough Pocock in the film? In the book, his Zen-like quotes begin each chapter: Example: “What is the spiritual value of rowing? … The losing of self entirely to the cooperative effort of the crew as a whole.” What’s odd is that the team-effort thing is so much better communicated in the book, which is mostly a one-man job, rather than in the movie, which is wholly a team effort.

Will Clooney ever make a movie that wows? Did he ever? I remember liking his first, the Chuck Barris thing. His next, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” was a 2005 best-picture nominee, but it was merely OK for me and feels like it’s faded from view. “Ides of March” wanted to be a 1970s political/paranoid thriller and wasn’t. “Monuments Men” wasted great source material and an all-star cast. “The Tender Bar” felt too surface. Ditto this. 

Clooney does one thing I like. Back in 2014, reading about that last race in the Olympics for the gold, against the Brits, Italians and Nazis, I found myself all but rowing along. Brown describes the tension and the drama of the four-mile race so well that my body was literally moving back and forth in bed as if I were the ninth man in the boat. And that’s the moment Clooney puts us in there. The camera rows back and forth with the eight, and so do we. It’s a moment. I wish the movie had more of them.

Well, we’ll always have the book. They can’t take that away from us. Yet.