Review
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA – Review
Daisy Ridley stars as Trudy Ederle, the first woman to successfully swim the English Channel, in the inspiring, true story-based YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA. Today, few know of Trudy Ederle and her accomplishments but this uplifting film may change that. At the time of her swim in 1926, it was said that women couldn’t swim the notoriously difficult, storm-tossed 21-mile stretch of water separating England and France, but the 19-year-old American swimmer, the daughter of German immigrant parents, proved them wrong – and bested the men’s record by more than 3 hours.
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA is a Disney film, based on Glenn Stout’s 2009 book “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World,” is a must-see for families with daughters interested in sports and especially swimming. The gripping, inspiring scenes swimming the Channel are worth the ticket price alone.
Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle was born in 1905 in New York, to poor German immigrant parents, at a time when there was a lot of prejudice against German immigrants, something that was heightened by World War I. We meet the family when Trudy is a child suffering with a severe case of measles, so severe that she is not expected to live. But survive she does, and then goes on use that will to survive in her career in sports.
In the early 20th century, women had few rights and faced many restrictions imposed by male-dominated society, but women also were fighting for the vote and pushing the boundaries of those restrictions. However, all Trudy’s mother Gertrude (Jeanette Hain) wanted was for Trudy and her sister Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) to learn to swim, even thought is was thought unsuitable for girls and possibly harmful to their bodies. Like most men of the era, Trudy’s father Henry (Kim Bodnia) thought women should only be wives and mothers, and anything else was laughable. But Trudy’s mother, whose sister drown as a child, was just as strong-willed as her daughter, and insisted that both girls learn to swim as well as their younger brother. Dad gives permission for his daughter Meg to have swimming lessons but refuses to let Trudy go – until Trudy badgers him into it, relentlessly singing the song “Ain’t We Got Fun” until he agrees.
Even with her father’s permission, Trudy faces a new barrier. She may have survived measles but she is denied entry to swimming lessons because it was thought that it might cause her to lose her hearing, a concern that did have some basis. So, Trudy’s father teaches her to swim, at the pier on Coney Island, where Trudy reveals she has a natural gift in the water. Soon, she and her sister are winning contests swimming around the pier. The sisters bond over swimming and when they decide to join one of the first girls’ swim teams, coached by the ground-breaking Charlotte “Eppy” Epstein ( a wonderful Sian Clifford), Trudy again must prove herself just to get in the pool. Her talent and hard work earn her a spot at the Olympics on the first American women’s team to go to them.
In the early 1920s there is great craze for all kinds of athletic accomplishments, including swimming the English Channel, a notoriously difficult and dangerous swim, beset by storms, changeable currents as well as sharks and jellyfish. Many have tried and few had made it. Only five men have succeeded, including the colorful Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham), and it is thought that no woman could do it. Of course, Trudy wants to prove that wrong.
Daisy Ridley is splendid as Trudy, and hopefully this role will go away towards lifting the actor’s profile with audiences and casting directors. While the film isn’t always perfect, she generally is, playing a truly winning version of this amazing, courageous young woman athlete, someone who should be better known than she is now. The rest of the cast are good as well, with particular standouts being Tilda Cobham-Hervey as her sister, Jeanette Hain as Trudy’s strong-willed but tight-lipped mother, and Stephen Graham as the eccentric champion swimmer Bill Burgess. In smaller roles, Sian Clifford is striking as coach Epstein, and Alexander Karim as another would-be Channel swimmer Benji Zammit.
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA is a Disney movie, and while it is still a worthy family film and great for young female athletes, it has some Disney-fying. It puts a great deal of emphasis on Trudy’s close relationship with her sister, and also on the patriarchy that weighed heavily on their lives, and spends little time showing Trudy training or working with her coach Eppy Epstein. The film showcases Trudy’s relentless determination, but her relationships with her sister and her family, while sweet, is kept more on the surface. An overly-emotional, excessively-loud and obvious score comes on too strong at times, overwhelming any real feeling the audience might have, and is the film’s biggest flaw.
The film focuses quite a bit on the father’s plan to arrange marriages for his daughters, and her sister’s acquiescence. The film accurately portrays the oppressive patriarchy of the time, and many things that seem unreal now – like the belief that exercise was harmful to women’s bodies and their inability to do certain things – were very real then, although these prejudices were often reinforced by men making sure they were the case. Still, a number of men in the story are crafted into one-note villains, given larger roles as a way to simplify that, particularly James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler) and coach Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), who attempted the Channel swim 22 times without success and may actually have wanted Trudy to fail.
This is an inspiring true story but the film itself plays loose with some of the facts, which is really unnecessary considering Ederle’s very impressive real accomplishments as a champion swimmer and Olympian. The film downplays some of her accomplishments, failed to mention her gold medal as part of the relay and only talks about her individual bronze medals. The film also reduces the real role her coach Epstein played in her accomplishment, instead elevating some male figures to play a larger role as villains. The film puts emphasis on the very real barriers and discrimination women faced in sports and life, in the early 20th century, but less on Trudy Ederle’s success in smashing through them. Another odd thing is the repeated refrain that she survived measles, at a time when it was a common childhood disease (there was no vaccine until 1963) that most people between the ages of 5 and 20 survived. Trudy was one of those who had a more serious case but saying “she survived measles” would have been met with a lot of “so did I” back then.
Still the film really excels and reaches its highest point, when it gets to swimming the channel. The dramatic seascapes energize the film and the focus is finally truly on the young woman and the sea. Daisy Ridley gets to really shine here. Swimming the channel is a thrilling sequence, with the feel of authenticity. Stephen Graham comes to the fore as the eccentric Bill Burgess, one of five male swimmers to have already conquered the Channel, but who steps forward to help Trudy in her quest.
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA is an inspiring true-story sports movie that is highly recommended for girls and young women and for families, with thrilling scenes of the Channel swim itself and a chance to get to know something about an American champion swimmer who deserves to be better known – Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel.
YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA opens Friday, May 31, in theaters.
RATING: 3 out of 4 stars
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