George Clooney Embraces Full Cornball With His Depression-Era Sports Flick 'The Boys In The Boat'

By Jason Adams | Film | December 24, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | December 24, 2023 |

Perfectly adequate! Both serviceable and watchable! I watched it twice, and I didn’t fall asleep either time, although I could have, and it would’ve been a pretty okay sleep, probably! Such are the phrases I find tumbling around my brain when I think of George Clooney’s latest directorial effort The Boys in the Boat, which tells the story of the ragtag 1936 University of Washington rowing team who “defied the odds” and their “humble beginnings” to “go all the way” to Hitler’s Olympics, sending the sniveling dictator off with a frown planted under his lil’ stache, giving our downtrodden nation “hope.”

Forgive me the sarcasm all those excessive quotation marks insinuate, but somebody has to make up for this movie’s sheer dearth of soul—less a “feel good picture” than a “feel nothing” one this effort of Clooney’s at least feels less effortful than most of his strained stabs at this gig. I could rattle off the titles of his directing filmography, but it would require a trigger warning, and who needs that at the holidays? Saying “Suburbicon” out loud is practically a jump scare.

The Boys in the Boat, all golden and nostalgia-hued, doesn’t feel teleported in from the 1930s so much as it does the 1980s and 90s interpretations of said decade—it aches to sit alongside better movies like Driving Miss Daisy and Legends of the Fall and Rambling Rose. Field of Dreams, dare to dream. Seabiscuit Americana. Alexandre Desplat’s hokey score shimmers with James-Horner-ian twinkle and Martin Ruhe’s cinematography washes out the skies to a warm womb-like yellow and radio announcers talk rat-a-tat truisms about “those good boys.” The ones in the boat, natch.

We only really get to know one of those boys in that boat (also natch), and that’s Joe Rantz, played by a bleached-out Callum Turner looking like he stumbled out of an Abercrombie catalog or a Leni Riefenstahl film—let’s just split the difference. How he affords to keep those highlights so high when he hasn’t got a penny to fix the hole in the bottom of his boot I couldn’t tell you, but like all Good American Boys he keeps his chin up and his holey boots to the grind and somehow magic just sprinkles down around him.

He does start the film in dire Depression-era straits, to be sure—he lives in a rusty jalopy, he can’t find a job to pay his college tuition and is on the verge of being kicked out of school, and there’s that aforementioned hole in his boot. But before his roots can start to show one of his also-hard-up classmates suggests a solution—if they try out for and get a place on the rowing team their tuition and housing will be dealt with. Because sports. And America! But mostly sports.

Already waxed to a dreamy sheen meant for posing upon propaganda posters, it’s never in doubt that Joe will make the team—from the start the crew-team’s coaches (Joel Edgerton and James Wolk) all gaze upon him like an exclamation point and not a question mark. Beautiful Joe never really struggles with much, although the script does try to drop a couple mines in his way—an estranged father, some poverty jokes from his teammates—to not much avail. Frictionless, he speeds through the water toward the team’s inevitable gold medal win, and so goes the picture.

With similar ease an equally Aryan gal named Joyce (Hadley Robinson) just falls into Joe’s lap one day. Basically literally she’s just suddenly sitting in his lap one day and never leaves. They’ve got a deeply sex-less and “decent” backstory where they were in second-grade together and Joe gave her a Valentine that she’s held onto it ever since, even inexplicably bringing it to college with her though the two hadn’t seen each other since they were children. I’d cry “stalker” but one look at Callum Turner and such obsessions become understandable. Their romance is as pre-ordained as anything in the film’s last act, but like everything it’s pretty and sweet and simple and really truly I do mean it—sometimes that’s enough.

Clooney cooks up this cornball soufflé with plenty of ham, plenty of cheese, a piled-high side of white bread and white milk to wash it down. And maybe this is the kind of conventional malarkey that Clooney should’ve been trying for all this time with his directing gigs because it goes down super easy. It asks absolutely nothing from you. It will play tremendously well in the background at your family’s house over a holiday, the hum of the cheering of crowds and the splashing of water turning your father’s snoring into a merry melody to ease everybody’s indigestion.