When I was in the fifth grade, I ran my first cross country event.  I was on the team for my school at the time, though I cannot say I had any real coaching.  Instead, that was provided by my dad.  His advice was to take it easy at the start, but I would not listen.  After some back and forth, I convinced him that if I began fast, I could get a big enough lead and thereby win.  Finally, he said fine, though he probably knew what would be the result.  Thus, when the race commenced, I took off at a sprint and zoomed ahead of the competition.  Soon enough, my experienced legs began to fail me and I watched as a steady stream of fellow adolescents passed me.  These memories came back to me as I watched The Boys in the Boat.  While it is about rowing crew rather than long distance running, the principles are roughly the same, if the movie is any indication.  There is also a great deal to be said about it in terms of how to approach our relationship with God.

Instead of The Boys in the Boat, it is an elderly Joe Rantz (Ian McElhinney) who opens the proceedings, looking on as his grandson (Austin Haynes) and some other rowers ply a river with motorboats speeding a rowdy way nearby.  Why Joe Rantz?  Because back in 1936, he (Callum Turner) was part of an eight-man rowing crew that won Olympic gold.  I just spoiled the entire movie, but stick with me anyway as I tell you how they achieve this goal.  It does not look like this would be the case when we meet the younger Joe.  He is living in a Hooverville outside of Seattle, Washington, his abode being a defunct car.  He is a freshman at the University of Washington, but without the money to continue to pay for tuition, he is in danger of losing his place at the school.  Because of the Great Depression, like so many other people he is having a difficult time finding work.  One day, Roger Morris (Sam Strike), a friend and classmate, tells him about the opportunity to be on the school’s rowing team.  Not only would it take care of school fees, but it would provide extra money and a place to stay.  Indeed, despite having no experience being on a crew, he tries out, his main question to Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) being how much the position pays.  Having the basics of food and shelter would also help his prospects with Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson), a girl he has known since the fourth grade.  It is this determination that pushes Joe throughout the tryouts and brings him to the attention of Coach Ulbrickson.  Coach Ulbrickson is under some pressure, too.  In previous seasons, he had overseen a team that had lost to the rival University of California, and the University of Washington’s boosters want them to return to winning ways.  Thus, he carefully selects the best eight (nine if you count the alternate) to man the junior varsity shell (this is an alternate name for the boat, for which this writer is grateful).  While the selections, Joe among them, are all strong, they prove resistant to learning how to pump their oars as one, which is necessary for victory.  This leads to the first change: bringing in a new coxswain, Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery).  This person is basically the captain of the boat, responsible for setting the pace and calling out other directions.  With Bobby, though they still appear slow, they go out to defeat Cal at their first official race, coming from behind after getting off to a slow start.  This is to be a theme for practically all the competitions you see in the film.  This victory earns notoriety for the junior varsity team, but puts Coach Ulbrickson in a predicament.  Everyone expects the upperclassmen to get the attention, particularly because they are the more experienced group and this is a year that the victorious college team will be sent to represent the United States in the Berlin Olympic games.  Yet, the younger squad is proving the more capable.  There is an argument between himself and his assistant, Coach Tom Bolles (James Wolk), as to which to send to compete in the national heat, junior varsity or varsity.  Coach Ulbrickson favors Joe and the rest of the upstarts, where as Coach Bolles wants to rely on those who have been around longer.  Ultimately, the decision is up to Coach Ulbrickson, and he chooses the junior varsity crew.  On the eve of heading across the country to face the Ivy League competition, Joe has a run in with his father, Harry Rantz (Alec Newman), who had abandoned Joe when the young man was fourteen.  Their interaction puts Joe into a foul mood, one that he carries with him to Poughkeepsie where the next competition is to be held.  Joe is ready to quit when he gets some wise words from George Pocock (Peter Guinness), who tells Joe that if he leaves the team he will be no better than his father.  Thus, Joe is back at the oar the next day and they go on to qualify to represent the United States.  However, due to budget shortfalls, the American Olympic Committee tells Coach Ulbrickson that they have to come up with the $5,000 required to send them to Berlin.  Thus, they start an impromptu fund-raising campaign that raises the necessary funds in five days.  The problems do not stop once they get overseas, however.  The first is when their front rower, Don Hume (Jack Mulhern) comes down with an illness that jeopardizes his ability to be in the shell.  The other is the unfavorable starting position they are given even though they were the best team in the preliminaries.  This leads to Bobby not hearing the signal to start the final race.  All the same, they make up the distance and take home the gold.  The final scene is of Joe talking to his grandson about how a crew races as one.

This last bit of wisdom offered to Joe’s grandson in The Boys in the Boat speaks to the problem I had with what is otherwise a solid piece of cinema.  As you might have noticed, I started by talking about Joe, who is the focus for roughly three quarters of the film.  Yet, to convey the whole story to you properly, I wrote in broader terms.  Throughout much of the proceedings, you see the events through his perspective.  The Hooverville, his struggles with finding work, the pleasure he takes in having a bed of his own when he makes the team, and the relationship that develops with Joyce, these all make Joe the main character.  Yet, after sticking with him through all this, the attention shifts away from him and becomes generally about the team.  To a certain degree, this works because the whole point of building a crew is that they learn to work together.  This is a lesson that Coach Ulbrickson reminds Joe about when the young man asks to rejoin the team on the eve of the Poughkeepsie race.  It is the old cliché about there being no I in team.  I get all this, but it would have been nice if at some point over the last twenty to thirty minutes we came back to Joe to see how he is feeling about all their accomplishments, otherwise why do the first three-fourths of the movie as they did?

Despite The Boys in the Boat going away from Joe’s experiences towards the end, my Catholic sensibilities liked pretty much all the metaphors about rowing the boat and everyone working together to ensure its smooth operation.  Indeed, the Bible, particularly the New Testament, have many moments that refer to vessels on the water.  What I like best, though, is the way the rowers use their effort to get to the finish line.  Here, again, we have parallels in Scripture.  2 Timothy 4:7 says, “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.”  You can apply this to the way the shells compete in the film.  The first thing that is needed is relationship.  A crew needs to communicate with one another as we need to do with God.  Without doing so, we will get nowhere, just like the boat.  One gets to their destination faster by continuing to practice with one another.  One of the ways we always talk about doing our Faith is that we are practicing it.  It is a good word for how this operates.  Few of us come out of the womb with a fully formed ability to interact with God.  Our parents are our first teachers with this, though as in the film, sometimes they prove to be not the best for this particular job.  When this happens, you need to rely on experience.  This comes with going to Mass, saying your prayers, regular confession, etc.  In other words, by practicing.  At the same time, it needs to be realized that salvation, or victory in that proverbial race, comes only with sustained effort.  Sometimes there are stretches in our lives that need a stronger application of our energy and time.  At other moments, we can ease off a bit and save up for when the going gets tougher, as they say.  One can see all these virtues on display in the film.

One of the reasons I saw The Boys in the Boat is because my current houses guests were excited about it, and wanted to hear about it.  My reaction to them when I entered was that it is a perfectly adequate piece of cinema.  That is not a ringing endorsement, though you could do a lot worse.