The Boys in the Boat review – George Clooney sports drama goes for patriotic boosterism

George Clooney has been a charming and dapper Anglophile presence on the awards circuit this season while promoting the new movie he’s directed, some of which was shot not far from where he lives near Henley-on-Thames. So it’s sad to report that his film clunks harder than redwood. It is a stodgy and sententious varsity-sports underdog drama from the Depression era, a bit like his 1920s American football film Leatherheads, from 2008, but minus the comedy. Weirdly, it is as if this earnest but perfunctorily imagined film is always ordering us to feel nostalgic and sentimental about a time and place of which no one involved can have any real memory or feeling.

It tells the true story of how a gutsy crew of nine guys from the humble University of Washington battled to compete for Olympic rowing gold at the Berlin games in 1936, shrugging off Ivy League snobs and Nazi cheats along the way. Screenwriter Mark L Smith (who co-scripted Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant) has adapted Daniel James Brown’s bestselling book of the same title, and Clooney directs. Joel Edgerton plays gruff and taciturn coach Al Ulbrickson, who takes the sensational decision to take his junior crew of young talents to the Olympics rather than the more seasoned seniors, and then rages at the sneering obstructionists among the US rowing authorities who would prefer the Waspy east coast bluebloods to compete for America rather than his blue-collar team who are actually better at rowing. (You might remember the meanie Winklevoss twins from David Fincher’s The Social Network in a later era: entitled snobs who learned their habits of superiority in a rowing crew at Harvard.)

British actor Callum Turner plays Joe Rantz, a lonely kid from a broken home who often went hungry during his studies and got into rowing to pay for his course. Peter Guinness is British-born boatbuilder George Pocock. In Berlin, Jyuddah Jaymes plays Jesse Owens, who politely tells his cornfed, puzzled white teammates that he’s running to prove his point against the bigots in America rather than Germany. And Daniel Philpott has a Mel-Brooks-ish cameo as the bad-loser Führer himself, growling and scowling at US success.

The overall effect is sturdy and unsubtle, with some very strong racing scenes which certainly toy with the audience’s expectation that surely one of these tense competitions will involve the character-building experience of losing. The Poughkeepsie Regatta features the rather amazing (and historically accurate) spectacle of cheering onlookers being carried along beside the river on a converted open railway carriage. But the dialogue scenes are often frankly comic-book level, both strident and wooden. When Joe meets-cute with his sweetheart Joyce (Hadley Robinson) they have a deafeningly loud flirtatious conversation in what appears to be a library, with other extras gazing at their books, evidently in a trance. The inner life of Coach Ulbrickson is an uninteresting mystery and that excellent performer Edgerton is wasted.

You might call this a film in the booster-ish spirit of old Hollywood pictures such as Knute Rockne, All American from 1940, with Ronald Reagan as the heartwrenchingly brave football star George “the Gipper” Gipp. George “the Cloonster” Clooney is capable of putting much more on the scoreboard; this feels like an animatronic museum display.

• The Boys in the Boat is released on 25 December in the US, on 4 January in Australia and 12 January in the UK