Review of 'The Girl and the Sea': epic story of perseverance

After distance swimmer Trudy Ederle swam the English Channel in 1926, she held the largest parade for an athlete in New York City, ever. As the first woman to swim in the channel, she effectively paved the way for the future of women's sports. So why isn't he a more well-known name? The new biopic “The Girl and the Sea” seeks to change that, reestablishing Ederle as a world-changing icon.

This gripping sports biopic is a throwback to the types of inspirational underdog stories we love, like “Rudy,” but with a girl-power feminist bent and a woman-versus-nature theme. Daisy Ridley plays the cheerfully determined Trudy, and the film is filled with a supporting cast of charming characters who offer touches of humor and heart. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, it is a triumphant and emotional sports film similar to “Remember the Titans” and “Glory Road.”

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning tackles Trudy's life story with a screenplay by Jeff Nathanson, adapted from the 2009 story “The Girl and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World” by Glenn Stout. (Rønning and co-director Espen Sandberg also made the oceanic adventure film “Kon-Tiki,” which could have been titled “The Young and the Sea.”) These filmmakers clearly have a knack for capturing nautical adventure and the delirious but undeniably human. Desire to conquer the seas.

But dive below the surface and you'll discover much more to this story than that of a strong young woman who completed an incredibly dangerous and challenging feat of athleticism and mental toughness against all odds. As you scroll through the channel, there's a clever subplot that speaks to larger ideas and movements animated by Trudy's story. Boats full of journalists chase her, throwing bottles full of missives written on pieces of paper at her, which are taken out of the water and tied to carrier pigeons that take them to a French hotel in Cap Gris-Nez and read them aloud, she later reported via telegram to radio stations around the world, who broadcast the news to Trudy's anxious family in New York City. This is not just the story of a young woman doing the seemingly impossible: it is a media story taking place in a newly globalized world that collectively listens with bated breath.

That representational charge is an underlying current that continually boils in “The Young Woman and the Sea.” Trudy knows that it's her visibility that will change the world, not just the simple act of swimming across the channel. Her trainer, Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), pressured by her sponsor, James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler), forces her to diet, worried about how she will look in photographs of her; Her two-piece swimsuit, redesigned for comfort, is making waves in the French press. But it's her stardom that makes her a hero to the young girls who ask her for autographs in crowds of journalists, and she has the potential to change the trajectory of women's sports.

Trudy's swim inspires the entire world, including her hometown of New York City, the tenements filled with immigrants listening to her journey on the radio. It's a reminder of how we feel compelled by narratives of human effort and triumph. From Sunday football to the Olympic Games, collectively watching and sharing these stories unites us. This summer's Paris Olympics are, in fact, the centenary of the Games in which Trudy competed in 1924.

The expansive narrative evokes a kind of retro cinema based on pure sensation and emotion, in which we root for the heroes and mock the villains. There isn't much nuance to some of the characterizations. Eccleston and Fleshler essentially play cowardly, mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, without exploring their characters' overtly evil motivations for sabotaging Trudy. But not all men feel threatened by her efforts. She wins over other swimmers with her courage, including iconic channel swimmer Bill Burgess (a standout Stephen Graham), who eventually trains her.

Among the fantastic supporting characters are Trudy's German immigrant parents, with Danish actor Kim Bodnia playing Trudy's father, a gruff, protective but ultimately understanding butcher, and German actress Jeanette Hain, who almost steals the entire show. film as Trudy's steely, ethereal mother, Gertrud. She insists that her daughters, Trudy and her sister, Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), learn to swim after the steamboat tragedy that killed hundreds of women, and says that her daughters will never “stop on a boat in calls”. But Gertrud also discovers that empowering them leads to glories (and dangers) she never imagined.

There's an old-fashioned yet modern beauty and grandeur to Rønning's style here, which is meticulously produced and designed and filmed with epic, sweeping camera movements by Oscar Faura, but edited with rapid narrative efficiency by Úna Ní Dhonghaíle. With a triumphant score by Amelia Warner, there's a touch of Bruckheimer's “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style joy in the powerful orchestration that adds to the sense of melodrama at play.

Ultimately, this is the story of a young girl and the sea, and it is Trudy's experience that Ridley deftly inhabits. She eliminates all the reporters, the skeptics, the concerned family members, the coaches, her dear sister, and everyone watching around the world. In the dead of night, there is only Trudy, alone in the ocean, and that story of determination is worth celebrating and remembering.