Tag: English Channel

YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA – Review

Daisy Ridley as Trudy Ederle in Disney’s live-action YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA. Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2024 Disney Enterprises Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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

YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA – © 2024 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SWIMMING TO FERGUSON – Review

Henry Biggs attempts his marathon swim at Catalina Island.

If Henry Biggs were really swimming to Ferguson, he would have started in the Mississippi and made his way up Maline Creek, although he would have had to walk part of the way to get there.

What Henry Biggs is really doing is swimming around Manhattan Island. Although more a runner than a swimmer, Henry planned to swim 28.5 miles around Manhattan. It isn’t just the distance that makes this hard but the fact that he is swimming against current, tides and in areas more accustomed to seeing boats than swimmers.

This open-water marathon is an impressive swimming challenge but what does that have to do with Ferguson? Biggs says he was deeply affected by what happened in Ferguson in 2014, after unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot by white policeman Darren Wilson, and he is using his athletic feat to raise money and awareness for Ferguson. The fundraising is admirable and doubtless Biggs is sincere. but it seems like people are already pretty aware of what happened in Ferguson, so it feels a bit more like Biggs is using Ferguson to draw attention to his swimming feat than the reverse.

Part of the problem is that title. While one can easy accept that Henry Biggs was moved by what happened in Ferguson and wanted to do something to help, what does ultra-marathon swimming really have to do with Ferguson?

Well, nothing really, which leaves director Derek Elz with the problem of figuring out how to link the two topics. The documentary tries to solve this by moving back and forth between spotlighting Henry Biggs and his swimming challenge, and a discussion of what happened in Ferguson.

To its credit, when the documentary focuses on Ferguson, it mostly features people who were there or have an real connection to events, rather than just outside experts and pundits. Among those featured are Michael Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., a voice less often heard than the teen’s mother McSpadden The documentary also strives for some degree of balance in viewpoints, although everyone agrees that events escalated out of control and that it sparked a national conversation.

The documentary is very polished and professional, following the usual format of on-camera interviews, archival stills and footage, including some of the swimmer training, promoting his fundraiser before crowds and then the marathon swim itself.

Henry Biggs seems like an interesting character, a middle-aged white man who comes across as a colorful character with diverse interests and apparently a lot of money. Biggs also seems very well-connected. Among the people who speak about his planned swimming marathon are sportcaster Joe Buck and a host of champion marathon swimmers.

The personal side of Henry Biggs is covered by friends and family. Henry’s wife Theresa, an adjunct professor of Italian at St. Louis University, describes her husband when she first met his as a kind of scruffy, disheveled “dude,” but that dude earned a PhD, an MBA, a law degree and a Masters in computer science. He also participated the Boston Marathon and Iron Man. Other interviewees include a pair of African American friends, Henry’s “Little Brother” from Big Brothers, Jamyel Collins, now CEO of JDC Vending, and an assistant dean at Washington University (where Biggs works), Dr. Harvey R. Field, Jr.

Biggs himself says he wants to raise funds for educational initiatives in Ferguson, particularly mentoring programs, inspired by his 30 plus years working with Big Brothers Big Sisters. To prepare, Biggs swam six hours a day, in pools or open water.

As part of the swimming section, the film briefly gives some background on marathon open-sea swimming, focusing on feats like swimming the English Channel, and covers the unique challenges of those kinds of athletic attempts. Among the difficulties swimmers face with the English Channel are the cold water temperatures as well as waves and weather. One marathon swimmer described the channel as “the Mount Everest of open-water swims.” Still Henry was among those who swam it as a young man.

Actually, Henry takes the swimming challenge a bit further, when he learns that Manhattan Island and the English Channel are two of the three legs in the open-water “Triple Crown,” and he decides to try to swim the third one, around Catalina Island, also as a fundraiser for Ferguson. It is footage of this swim that is presented in the documentary, rather than the swim around Manhattan.

In the Ferguson sections interspersed throughout, the documentary does feature people close to the events in Ferguson, including Michael Brown Sr. talking about hearing his son was laying in the street bleeding. Many people in the St. Louis region watched in horror and embarrassment as authorities engaged in a series of bad decisions, at the local, regional and state level, that led to escalating violence, as the whole nation and even the world watched.

Besides members of Michael Brown’s family, those offering commentary on what happened are include by Captain Ron Johnson, the black Missouri Highway Patrol captain who was appointed commander of the police response as things began to spin out of control. Johnson attempted to de-escalate tensions between police and protesters by changing the tone of police interactions and backing off the paramilitary approach, but he arrived too late to turn the tide. Other voices offer another perspective, defending Darren Wilson’s actions as a judgment call or the authority’s responses. Among the voices are Ferguson mayor James Knowles II, who says that events in Ferguson were “a spark that set off the emotions of people who hadn’t been heard. There were so many people there for so many different reasons, and it became a situation where people who were there to protest peacefully were now intermixed with people there to do harm.” an insight authorities at the time did not grasp until it was too late. “Water finally boiled out of the pot.” as Capt. Johnson put it.

The discussion on Ferguson is thoughtful and well-balanced, and its greatest strength is that is it the people involved who speak, not outside pundits. Still, what is discussed perhaps does not really add much to what has already been said about what happened or its significance for the country.

Throughout, the film feels like two different documentaries mashed together: one a thoughtful discussion on events in Ferguson by the people who witnessed it, and the other a personal profile of an accomplished middle-aged man attempting a daunting athletic feat. What happened in Ferguson launched the Black Lives Matter movement and a national conversation on race and police, as well as some elected officials losing elections and an increase in black political participation in in the St. Louis region. That is serious stuff compared to one man preparing for a marathon swim, and the documentary really does struggle to connect the two. It really does not, and instead focuses on each story, the swimming challenge and Ferguson, by turns. Even the tone does not match, as the Ferguson section is serious and socially reflective, while the swimming portion feels more personal and lighter, no matter how difficult the marathon swim.

These subjects would have been better served by two separate documentaries. This awkward combination, however well-meaning it may be, makes this film an oddity that might have a fairly narrow audience.

SWIMMING TO FERGUSON opens Friday, Sept. 14, at the Tivoli Theater.

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars