416 words
The Boys in the Boat is a sports film, the true story of the eight-man crew team from the University of Washington in Seattle that won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The themes are athleticism, teamwork, mentorship, and the struggle for excellence, with several gripping race sequences. That is enough for an exciting film. But this is also a moving film, featuring a number of well-drawn characters struggling with adversity and responding to moral conflicts with acts of nobility.
This being a film about student athletes at the University of Washington in the 1930s, the cast is of course entirely white and remarkably good-looking. The hairstyles, clothes, and settings of the period are also very attractive.
The Boys in the Boat is so white, morally wholesome, and refreshingly normal that it seems like the product of another age and another movie industry. This was even more surprising given that the director is George Clooney, whose directorial debut, The Monuments Men, is terrible.
When I learned that the UW team was headed to Chancellor Hitler’s Berlin Olympics, I braced myself. Surely Clooney could not contain himself. But no, aside from an overly animated clip of Hitler gesticulating and Hitler turning abruptly away in disappointment when the Americans beat the Germans and Italians in a photo-finish (take that, Hitler!), the whole Berlin sequence is remarkably constrained. Actually, I couldn’t help noticing that Hitler’s Aryan supermen looked pretty much like America’s Aryan supermen.
Of course, it was inevitable that Jesse Owens would appear, but he was actually at the 1936 Olympics, although I don’t know if he traded words with the UW crew or if this was just an invention to give at least a few lines to a numinous Negro. A few black faces were also sprinkled in the crowds watching the crew races in America, which seems highly unlikely.
The Boys in the Boat features an excellent script, fine performances and cinematography, an effective but unobtrusive score, and a sure directorial hand. This isn’t great drama, simply because it is a true story of ordinary white people triumphing over ordinary challenges. Mainstream critics greeted this film coldly. They recognized that it is entertaining, moving, and well-made. But it doesn’t subvert expectations, challenge norms, transgress boundaries, or serve the all-important anti-white agenda like every other piece of crap out of Hollywood. Although The Boys in the Boat is no masterpiece, it is something much rarer: a wholesome, unpretentious film about appealing white people. I highly recommend it.
12 comments
If only these same boys didn’t jump back on a boat and revisit Europe eight years later. That last time the stayed too..
I will watch. Thanks for the review.
I’m sure there’s a sequel in the works that features an all black boating team that overcomes bigotry and racism to defeat this all white team from Washington.
I put it on my watchlist.
Thanks for the review.
It got me thinking about watching Hoosiers again. An all-white sports movie from the 80s starring Gene Hackman.
Good film, that one. Also reviewed here at Counter-Currents, I think.
One will notice in recent years that any movie depicting whites as suffering hardships or victims will be panned by reviewers. The movie Unbroken about Japanese prison camps received bad reviews a while back. It was similar to this movie—not particularly memorable, but far from unwatchable. The filmmakers even anticipated this, as they tried to play the “dago” angle-q.v. We are not allowed to depict whites as victims, which would detract from the narrative of nonwhite inability to succeed because of white oppression. Always whites as oppressors, except possibly when fighting other whites for minorities.
I’ll take it. A day will dawn where we make our own films. The occasional morsel with minimal dashes of numinous pepper is welcome in the interregnum.
I’ll just rewatch Disney’s ‘Miracle’ (with Kurt Russel). I have no need for anti-German sentiment or numinous negroes.
Do “Reagan” next please.
Let us know if it’s safe for us to watch.
Actually, the critics seem to really praise this film. “Frustratingly, uncomfortably white”, “the white boys from Washington”, “this film knows it has a race problem yet has no interest in meaningfully addressing it”. That’s high praise in my book! Audience score is 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, too.
But for all that, it may be better to read the book the film is based on. EDIT: See my comment below about the book.
Rereading this review made me recall another small movie about white achievement in sport. Has anyone ever seen The World’s Fastest Indian? A virtually all white cast featuring Anthony Hopkins in the lead. It portrays a simple New Zealander who makes his way to the Bonneville salt flats and proceeds to break a bunch of land speed records. I highly recommend it.
Reagan would be a very good movie for a politico to review. It has some subtext about the recent campus protest suppressions I thought when Reagan did something similar at Berkeley. I was reading about the Berkeley protests and the source said it started out as a protest about the Arab Israeli conflict. Interesting…I bet the real reason for the suppressions was that, even back then!
The way I see it, this is all by way of a unified rightward shift and preparing the country for a trump presidency and potential war with Iran.
I take back my suggestion to read the book. I was surprised to see several copies of it on the shelf of a classroom teacher with trans flags, black power fists, etc. decorating the room. I checked the index to see if there were any mentions of Jesse Owens. In fact there were three, but none mentioned any meeting between him and the team.
While looking for “Jesse” I noticed that there were lots of index entries under “Jews”. Flipping to a few of them revealed quite a lot of German-bashing. One example: “They nicknamed her Hilde… She was the second of what would become six Goebbels children, all of whom Magda Goebbels would order murdered with cyanide eleven years later.” There was no context that might explain why a mother might have her children killed, e.g. to save them from a fate feared to be worse than death at the hands of advancing Allied troops. The reader simply gets the impression that Nazis were incomprehensibly evil. Nor was there any apparent reason to include such a passage other than to reinforce the Nazis Bad narrative. Many passages are like this.
On the next page, about Mr. Goebbels: “… certain young starlets were of particular interest to Goebbels. A number of them soon found that attending to his erotic desires, despite his dwarfish stature and misshapen physique, went a long way towards enhancing their career prospects…” Even if true, it just reads like tabloid-level slander. And what does it have to do with racing boats?
Perhaps George Clooney did a better job adapting the book than some other Hollywood types would have.
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