Producers: Grant Heslov and George Clooney    Director: George Clooney   Screenplay: Mark L. Smith Cast: Joel Edgerton, Callum Turner, Peter Guinness, Jack Mulhern, James Wolk, Hadley Robinson, Courtney Henggeler, Sam Strike, Thomas Elms, Luke Slattery, Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Wil Coban, Thomas Stephen Varey, Joel Phillimore, Chris Diamantopoulos, Glenn Wrage, Edward Baker-Duly, Alec Newman, Jyuddah Jaymes and Daniel Philpott   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: C+

If asked to think of an unlikely American triumph at the 1936 Berlin Olympics—one that frustrated the hopes of Adolph Hitler, who watched the proceedings from the stands—you’d probably automatically focus on Jesse Owens.  But his story has already been told in Stephen Hopkins’ 2016 “Race” (not that it doesn’t deserve a better treatment than that).  Owens does appear, played by Jyuddah Jaymes, in George Clooney’s new film, but it’s in a very brief cameo that might make you think how much Owens looked like a young Chris Rock.   

No, “The Boys in the Boat” is about another American victory at the 1936 games—that of the University of Washington eight-man rowing team.  It might be less well-known (and less historically significant) than Owens’ multi-medal performance, but it was nonetheless remarkable, and even more unexpected—a true underdog sports story.           

Based on the 2013 book by Daniel James Brown, the film is formulaically old-fashioned to a fault.  It focuses on one of the boys of the title, Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), whom Brown interviewed prior to his death at ninety-three in 2007.  Rantz, whom the film shows in bookending scenes as an old man instructing his grandson in rowing, and who had been seat seven in Berlin, is portrayed as making his own way as a young man after being abandoned by his father Harry (Alec Newman) in the depths of the Great Depression.  He manages to gain entrance to the University of Washington, but the continuation of his engineering studies is threatened by a lack of tuition money, and so along with his friend Roger Morris (Sam Strike), he joins a mob of young men applying for spots on the school’s rowing team coached by Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) and his assistants Thomas Bolles (James Wolk) and George Pocock (Peter Guinness), because they carry stipends.  Joe and Roger are among the lucky few chosen after strenuous trials, making up a junior varsity team of lower-middle-class lads who would compete against squads of privileged boys from elite universities.

The film dutifully follows their training, as well as Joe’s romance with co-ed Joyce Simdars (Hadley Robinson), a golden-haired lass who meets him in the library and pursues him pretty relentlessly.  Of course he becomes as devoted to her as she is to him.  Joe also befriends Pocock, a serene man who lovingly crafts the team boats by hand and teaches him the tools of the trade.  Their patient smoothing of the hulls renders their relationship something akin to that between Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi.  Meanwhile Joyce’s unquestioningly supportive attitude toward Joe is paralleled by that of Hazel Ulbrickson (Courtney Henggeler) for her husband. 

That’s needed because Ulbrickson takes some unorthodox decisions powerful donors to the school object to, even after the junior team scores an unexpected triumph against the better-funded squad of the University of California Berkeley coached by Ky Ebrigh (Glenn Wrage), to which he’s assigned Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) as coxswain, the ninth man on the boat who directs the rowers.  The appointment proves an essential ingredient in the team’s success, since the key is not only the strength and stamina of the crew members, but their perfect synchronization as oarsman—something that Moch achieves although, to be honest, the film doesn’t explain how.

Ultimately the superior performance of the junior team leads Ulbrickson to choose it to go to Berlin—another unconventional move—after it defeats Berkeley in a final intercollegiate competition.  But once again monetary obstacles arise, and the team must undertake a fundraising drive to finance the trip.  Even in the midst of the Depression, however, people contribute, since rowing, one might be surprised to learn, was an extremely popular spectator sport in the thirties: millions listened to races crowded around radios, and many of them, underemployed or not employed at all, identified with a team of working-class boys. (Even Rantz’s father briefly returns to his son’s life and makes a donation.)  Still the drive falls short until, in one of the few surprises in the film, the necessary funds suddenly come from a most unlikely source.

Needless to say, the difficulties, which include a short-lived tiff between Rantz and Ulbrickson, do not cease with the team’s arrival in Germany.  The most problematic is the sudden illness of Don Hume (Jack Mulhern), seat one on the team and the only team member, apart from Rantz and Morris, to get more than cursory attention—an ailment so serious that it leads Ulbrickson to consider replacing him, even though that would undermine the team’s performance. Fortunately he recovers sufficiently to take his rightful place on the boat which, under Moch’s brilliant direction, comes from far behind to eke out a photo-finish victory, much to Hitler’s displeasure, over the German and Italian teams.  (Daniel Philpott, by the way, is quite the worst fake Fuhrer the screen has ever seen, except for Dick Shawn.)

Clooney tells this remarkable yet predictable tale in a sedate, genteel style; though the races are energetically staged and elegantly shot. often from above, by cinematographer Martin Ruhe, the pacing of almost everything else, as edited by Tanya Swerling, is unrushed, and the production design (by Kalina Ivanov) and costumes (by Jenny Eagan) are discreetly low-key in capturing the period.  Alexandre Desplat’s score is among his least imaginative, though it hits appropriate notes of longing and, when appropriate, triumph.

Though Slattery, Strike, Mulhern and especially Guinness have their moments, the drama is dominated by Turner, who projects straight-arrow intensity as Rantz, and Edgerton, who seems to be channeling Kevin Spacey as his stern coach, though Robinson, as Joyce, exudes charm.  Everyone else give performances that are adequate if unexceptional. 

“The Boys in the Boat” strives very hard to be an upbeat crowd-pleaser of the old school, and to an extent it succeeds; but its familiarity and reliance on cliché are impediments that even its polished surface can’t overcome.  

Producers: Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Scott Sanders and Quincy Jones   Director: Blitz Bazawule  Screenplay: Marcus Gardley   Cast: Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo, Corey Hawkins, Gabriella Wilson “H.E.R.”, Halle Bailey, Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Louis Gossett Jr., Ciara, Jon Batiste, David Alan Grier, Deon Cole, Tamela Mann, Stephen Hill and Elizabeth Marvel   Distributor: Warner Bros.  

Grade: C+

For what it is—a screen adaptation of a Broadway musical—Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple” is very well done.  It’s expertly cast with performers who can handle both the drama and the musical numbers, and while one could argue whether the visual style, which borrows from that of Steven Spielberg’s non-musical 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, is appropriate, it’s certainly expertly realized by the technical craftspeople—production designer Paul Denham Austerberry, costumer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck and cinematographer Dan Laustsen, who collaborates with choreographer Fatima Robinson and editor Jon Poll to ensure that the ensemble dances are captured in full-body splendor, without excessive panning and cutting.

If bringing Broadway pizzazz to the big screen were all that mattered, Bazawule’s film would have to be chalked up as a rousing success.  After all, many movie versions of better-known musicals have proven stilted and tired.  “The Color Purple” doesn’t.

But there’s a larger issue, one that carries over from the stage version (or versions, since the 2015 revival differed considerably from the 2005 original—though both had long runs).  That’s whether the story of abuse lends itself to musical treatment, or at least this kind of musical treatment. Dark tales have been musicalized before, of course, in both opera and theatre; but the ones that worked have added music suited to their darkness.  In this case, the score—mostly that of the Broadway show with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis and Stephen Bray—is at odds with the drama rather than enhancing it: its formulaic nature is incongruous beside the traumatic violence occurring around it.

A similar observation can be made about the film’s look.  Like Spielberg’s movie, this “Color” is glossy, with images so impeccably composed that they neuter the cruelty they’re showing.  The essential problem is that both the earlier film and this one sanitize the grim reality of the story being told, making it go down more easily than it should.  But in this case the music exacerbates the situation.

Still, even in the bowdlerized telling that Marcus Gardley has prepared from the book, Meeno Meyjes’s screenplay for Spielberg and Marsha Norman’s Broadway text, “The Color Purple” can’t help but retain the power of the novel to some extent.  The brutality inflicted on young Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) by her presumed father Alfonso (Deon Cole) and then by Albert, or “Mister” (Colman Domingo), to whom he turns her over—the rape, the separation from her children and, later, her beloved sister Nettie (Halle Bailey)—is all here, as is her continuing mistreatment in Mister’s misogynist household as a grown woman (Fantasia Barrino).  Even Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), the woman who found independence through her music, must contend with ostracism from her father Samuel (David Alan Grier), a rigid preacher. The message of black male toxicity and cruelty toward women in the early twentieth-century American South is undeniably there, if clothed in Spielbergian visuals.  The story of Sofia (Danielle Brooks), the uncompromising woman who marries Mister’s son Harpo (Corey Hawkins), expanded from Spielberg’s treatment, adds another element to the tragedy, the endemic racism that led to social brutalization, even if it’s encumbered by the twittering imbecility of Miss Millie (Elizabeth Marvel) as the white woman who takes advantage of her.

And yet the women’s interlocking stories all end with them overcoming their trials; “The Color Purple” is, finally, a comedy in the classical sense.  But here too the narrative takes an easy road.  Celie’s change of fortune comes in part through a change in her attitude, but mostly as a result of coincidences that have a deus ex machina quality—a revelation about her parentage, an unexpected inheritance, a backstory about Nettie and Celie’s lost children that can’t help but strain credulity.  Equally implausible are the abrupt changes of heart in male characters—Mister most obviously, but Samuel as well—that are integral to the women’s happy endings (expressed in a big communal sing-along that puts the intimacy of Spielberg’s close in the shade).  Ultimately these narrative issues don’t derive from the adaptations, but from the novel itself, but the adaptation styles worsen them.

So we’re left awaiting a version of “The Color Purple” that does real justice to the misery and viciousness that permeates much of the story Walker chose to tell.  Spielberg’s didn’t, and by adding Broadway-style musical numbers to a narrative that’s pretty much relentlessly grim over its first two-thirds, Bazawule’s doesn’t either. 

But if you’re willing to go along with the premise that the story of the brutalization of black women in early twentieth-century Georgia should be told in a fashion that maximizes its triumphant, feel-good possibilities despite one’s doubts about such an approach—and adds a lot of toe-tapping ensemble numbers and contrastingly heart-tugging solos to the mix—it’s hard to imagine it better done.  Bazawule and his technical team put on an almost brazen exhibition of pure showmanship, and Kris Bowers adds a background score that accentuates the heart-tugging.

And the cast is extraordinary.  Barrino, who succeeded LaChanze during the original Broadway run, makes Celie intensely sympathetic, and boasts vocal power to spare.  Brooks, who played the role in the 2015 stage revival, makes Sofia’s tragedy palpable, helped by the more expansive treatment of the character’s imprisonment.  Henson is utterly charismatic as the woman both Mister and Celie are entranced by (though the nature of the relationship between the women is treated very gingerly), and her delivery of Shug’s musical numbers would stop the show if it were on stage.

Among the men, Domingo certainly stands out as the odious Mister, though even he can’t persuade us of the character’s sudden transformation at the close.  Hawkins is fine as his more savory son, and Louis Gossett Jr. deserves a nod as his perhaps even more loathsome father.

As a Broadway-style adaptation of Walker’s novel, this is about as expert a piece as one could expect.  Whether the material was suitable for such an adaptation is another matter.