EIGHT MEN IN

Merry Christmas everyone! Now in theaters:

The Boys in the Boat--The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a highly satisfying episode for the good guys. Most famously, when Der Fuehrer said his was the Master Race, Jesse Owens heiled (phfft!) heiled (phfft!) right in Der Fuehrer's face. It wasn't enough to prevent the war that was coming, but it was a great foreshadowing of who would win.

Yet alongside that glorious debunking of supposed Aryan racial superiority, right under the noses of its promulgators, was another splendid underdog story. Briefly played by Jyuddah Jaymes, Owens is a minor figure in this period spectacle about the improbable rise of the University of Washington's eight-man crew to compete for the U.S. in those same games. It's directed by George Clooney from a script by Mark L. Smith, based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 book.

The story was remarkable before the crew got to Berlin. The UW boys were already upstarts in the sport, long associated with elite, affluent Eastern schools. This crew included working class, Depression-era grunts; the focus here is on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who when we first meet him is literally homeless. He lives in a junked car in a Seattle hobo jungle, patching the holes in the soles of his shoes while trying to eke out an engineering degree. He joins the crew for the stipend and the roof over his head.   

"Eight-man crew is the most difficult of all team sports," the coach here pronounces to the aspirants. "The average human body is just not meant for such things." I once had occasion to learn first-hand that my below-average human body wasn't meant for such things. Two of my nieces rowed crew, and back in the '80s I myself had the opportunity to take a one-man shell out onto the Potomac River; my near-helplessness in managing to get the thing to go anywhere gave me a small taste of how much delicate skill the sport requires, even setting aside its physical demands.

The Boys in the Boat gets across hints of this subtle precision; Clooney shows us, for instance, the hiccup-y little wrist-flip that precedes the return stroke. There's a great deal to like about the film, really, starting with what a wonderful, heartening story it tells. It's handsomely produced, with lustrous cinematography by Martin Ruhe, crisp editing by Tanya M. Swerling, another lovely score by Alexander Desplat. And it has rich, sometimes fascinating period detail, like the swanky spectator trains that run along the river banks at the fancier courses.

But as with several of Clooney's earlier directorial efforts, this movie is well-made, well-intentioned, good-hearted and generally enjoyable without being entirely satisfying. And unlike, say, The Monuments Men or The Tender Bar, it doesn't even have vivid star character actors to liven things up.

Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and Peter Guinness as master boat-maker George Pocock are authoritative presences, but not complex characters. The guys playing the crew aren't, as in the standard sports movie template, a ragtag band of misfits with distinctive oddball personalities; they're just pleasant, good-looking young men. Rantz's coed love interest (Hadley Robinson) tries to generate some playful, mischievous heat, but she's rowing upstream opposite her bland leading man.

Overall, this film has the flavor of a feature length Super Bowl commercial. Like the best of those commercials, it can raise an inspirational tingle. But I don't know that it does much more in two hours than a good Super Bowl commercial can do in sixty seconds.

RIGHT IN DER FUHRER'S FACE

Opening today:

Race—It’s sort of surprising that the story of Jesse Owens hasn’t made it to the big screen before. By which I mean, of course, made it to the big screen via actors and sets and dialogue and all that. The track and field star’s triumphs at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin were powerfully chronicled in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Olympia. But it took eighty years for Owens to get the standard inspirational sports biopic treatment.

James Cleveland Owens—a grade school teacher misheard his initials as “Jesse” and the name stuck—was born in Alabama in 1913 but spent most of his youth in Cleveland, Ohio. He was already tying world records while he was still in high school. On the Ohio State team, under Coach Larry Snyder, he famously set three world records in one 1935 meet at Ann Arbor, Michigan, all in less than an hour.

The following year he went to the Berlin Olympics, where he took four gold medals, for the 100 meter sprint, the 200 meter sprint, the long jump and as part of the 400 meter relay team. Magnificent simply on an athletic level, what made these victories all the sweeter was that Owens, an African-American, achieved them quite literally under the nose of Adolph Hitler, and in the face of his racial ideologies.

Race—there’s just possibly a double meaning to the title—makes the point that Riefenstahl’s propaganda film, meant to celebrate the ascendant Nazis, nonetheless acknowledged the greatness of Owens in a way that, for instance, the White House didn’t do for decades after. Indeed, director Stephen Hopkins and the screenwriters, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse, come uncomfortably close to making Riefenstahl (played by Carice van Houten) a heroine here. But the ironic point is well taken: the reception Owens got in Berlin, where he wasn’t segregated from the white athletes and where he was befriended by his German long jump opponent “Luz” Long, was superficially less ugly than he got at Ohio State and elsewhere in the U.S.

Complexities like this arise from the history; the movie itself is highly conventional sports-movie uplift, a little overlong and not always convincing in terms of period. Line after line—like “You’re an amazing girl” or “Good luck with that”—sound more Disney Channel than 1930s.

But the acting helps. Owens is played by a compact young actor named Stephan James, with a dulcet voice and a charming callowness. SNL alumnus Jason Sudeikis has a likable brassy manner as Larry Snyder, and there are enjoyable character turns by the likes of Jeremy Irons, William Hurt, Glynn Turman, David Kross.

More than any of this, however, Race works because of the story it tells. I wasn’t able to remain unmoved by it, at any rate. By the time the scenes at the Games arrived, I was as on the edge of my seat as if I’d been in the stands myself. 

Opening today at Harkins Valley Art in Tempe:

Southbound—This horror anthology, set on various stops along a desert highway, features several grim, blood-splattered tales linked end-to-end in the manner of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Different writers and directors handled each segment, but they’re certainly unified by a potent atmosphere of desert-southwest isolation, menace and futility. That’s on the upside.

Also on the upside, the special effects folks serve up some spectacular, scary demons. In general, this low-budget effort is a seamlessly made, technically impressive piece of work.

On the downside, the stories are a little vague and one-note. Because all the characters seem, not to put too fine a point on it, screwed from the start, the proceedings lack suspense or a sense that there’s much at stake.

The movie does, however, seem to have a cautionary message: Stay the hell out of the desert.