Young Woman and the Sea
This is the sort of live-action film Disney has been relatively out of the game making available theatrically for a while. It hit every single button I had. The underdog sports genre is something I just connect with, so long as the filmmakers get the formula right. “Young Woman and the Sea” does that in spades, and I’m absolutely on board.
The role of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, is one that makes a lot of sense for Daisy Ridley. When you think about her role as Rey, she is a headstrong a determined woman who is naturally talented, and wants to feel a sense of being challenged in her life. Rey gets her opportunity through circumstance; for Trudy, it is a desire to not have the same type of life her parents have had. She is a fighter, though; as the story begins, she is deathly ill with the measles…which she miraculously overcomes.
The film has a very familiar shape for a sports biopic, as Trudy first overcomes the odds to be a great standout as a female American swimmer, only for sexism to run rampant when she takes on challenges like the Olympics, and then, swimming the English Channel. The main person whose misogyny she must go through is that of Jabez Wolffe, a swimmer who is the man tasked with training the women’s Olympic swimming team, and then, Trudy as she swims the Channel. Wolffe is played by Christopher Eccleston in full asshole mode. We think he will be better for Trudy for the Channel swim, but his arrogance- and bitterness about not being able to make the swim himself- is front and center. On the other side, we get Bill Burgess, another big personality who has swam the Channel, and sees the talent in Trudy, and thinks she can make the swim. Burgess is played by Stephen Graham, and he is a hoot, and has great rapport with Ridley. Those two characters represent the sides of the sports world that Trudy is facing, in addition to the difficulty of getting her parents to be supportive of her.
At the heart of the film is Ridley. I don’t know if I’d say it’s her best role in film, but it shows that she is more than capable of carrying a film away from “Star Wars.” Trudy plays right into her wheelhouse as an actor, and she carries the film beautifully. There is determination and vulnerability in equal doses, and she is matched by Tilda Cobham-Hervey as her sister, Meg. Seeing how their lives diverge, and connect, is wonderful to see.
Ridley is the engine that drives the film, but “Young Woman and the Sea” is a successful distillation of genre cliches because screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joachim Rønning understand what this genre is supposed to do. Uplift, inspire and move. It does all three effortlessly.
