Tag: women’s rights

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.

RBG – Review

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Ruth Bader Ginsburg in RBG, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

RBG is a delightful, inspiring documentary on the Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, giving us the backstory the the 84-year-old Supreme Court justice who has become a pop culture icon. Long before she became known as the Notorious RBG, Ginsberg was a brilliant legal mind who was a courtroom ground-breaker in the battle for women’s rights.

This documentary gives us the low-down on this brilliant but reserved attorney who is having an unlikely turn as a cultural darling.

The documentary RBG starts out with clips of politically-conservative male pundits and politicians reviling Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg as if she were the devil incarnate. For these right-leaning white men, she may well be just that, or at least their worst nightmare, a characterization the small but mighty RBG might embrace, or maybe even relish.

We are introduced to a host of friends, family and colleagues of RBG, as the documentary gives us inspiring recap of her life of hard work and determination. The documentary also recaps the wide-spread discrimination women faced in the work place, and throughout society, in the 1950s.

As we learn in the documentary, two themes shaped the future justice. One was the classic American immigrant story – her father was from Russia and her mother the daughter of immigrants. The other was her belief from childhood that women were equal to men. The documentary introduces us to a blue-eyed little girl nicknamed Kiki, who often thought the boys’ more-daring games were more fun. Growing up, photos show a surprisingly pretty young woman but Ruth Bader was both smart and independent from the start, something encouraged by her mother.

The intelligent, studious young Ruth Bader, a quiet person who was not given to idle chat, married the outgoing, fun-loving Marty Ginsberg, who supported her ambitions and thought as she did that women could do anything men could do, a radical idea in the 1950s.

Already a married mother of a toddler when she started Harvard Law School, Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of only nine women at the law school yet made the Harvard Review her second year. This was despite the fact that her husband Marty, also in law school, was stricken with cancer, and she was caring for him and their daughter while doing her law school work and helping with his. Friends say this is when she learned to “burn the candle at both ends,” a high-energy life she has continued to live

The state of women’s rights in the 19050s is illustrated by the fact that when Ruth Bader Ginsberg graduated law school, no law firm would hire her simply because she was female. After becoming a law professor, she started working on women’s discrimination cases. Following the model of another Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall,who set the pace in Civil Rights working with ACLU, Ginsberg broke ground working for the ACLU for women’s rights.

If you did not admire this woman personally before, this film is likely to change after, even if you differ on politics. Besides her legal brilliance, her ability to surmount challenges, personal and professional, is inspiring, as is her remarkable work-ethic, which are enough to win anyone’s admiration.

One thing that is particularly fun in this film is seeing how much the dignified Supreme Court justice, someone consistently described as a quiet person who never engaged in small talk, seems to enjoy her pop culture designation as the Notorious RBG.

Inspiring and entertaining, RBG is a delightful exploration of the dynamic Supreme Court justice known as the Notorious RBG.

THE POST – Review

(Left to right) Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), David Cross (Howard Simons), John Rue (Gene Patterson), Bob Odenkirk (Ben Bagdikian), Jessie Mueller (Judith Martin), and Philip Casnoff (Chalmers Roberts) in Twentieth Century Fox’s THE POST. Photo Credit: Niko Tavernise.

In THE POST, director Steven Spielberg delivers a remarkable and timely film about freedom of the press, a story set in 1971 that has striking echoes for the present. President Nixon, who disdains the press, seeks to prevent publication of embarrassing secret government documents that expose decades of deceit of the American people on the Vietnam War.

Spielberg structures THE POST like a thriller, racing a ticking-clock and filled with intrigue. The director has put together a stellar cast for this top-notch thriller, led by Tom Hanks as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as the paper’s publisher Katharine Graham, the first women publisher of a major daily newspaper. Known as the Pentagon Papers, a portion of this trove of documents has already been published by the New York Times, but that paper has been stopped by a court order. When the documents come to Graham and Bradlee, they are faced with the choice: publish and risk the paper, maybe even jail, or let the President silence the free press and conceal the facts from the American people.

Comparisons to ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN is inevitable, and this is a worthy film to pair with that classic, but this is the story that preceded Watergate, and without which Watergate would not have happened. But this gripping fast-paced thriller also has elements in common with THE FRONT PAGE and other classic newspaper tales.

The First Amendment is not the only focus on this excellent, intelligent drama, which is one of the year’s best, but spotlights the challenges faced by publisher Katherine Graham, in the patriarchal 1970s, after she inherited the newspaper once owned by her father and then run by her late husband.

Streep is wonderful as Graham, who is determined to keep the paper her father built going and vital. She is always determined to do that but her demeanor seems to say otherwise, typical of a woman of her era. She starts out hesitant to challenge the condescension often shown by men who are supposed to advise her but increasingly finds steel to do so, in one scene reminding Robert McNamara that she is seeking his advice, not his permission.

 

The one exception is Bradlee. Hanks’ Bradlee is gruff and blunt in his dealings with everyone, including his boss Graham, and a sharp contrast to her diplomatic style of speech. But in the end, he always recognizes that it is her decision to publish or not. Bradlee is the bulldog pursing this story, a scoop that could put the paper on the map nationally, and clearly enjoys the fray. His scenes are built around this pursuit, which unfold with the urgency and excitement of a spy or political thriller.

The film is packed with the giant figures, good and bad, of this historic moment, when the press stood up for the people’s right to know in the face of a hostile government, eager to keep embarrassing truths hidden. The clip of Nixon speaking about the Pentagon Papers is Nixon’s actual voice, which adds to the drama and realism. Scenes of the running press add both a sense of the time period and twinge of nostalgia for an era of paper and ink.

The whole ensemble cast is wonderful, as is the pacing and photography, particularly the evocative images of rolling presses. Modern audiences may be taken aback at the easy sexism that Streep’s Graham faces in nearly every scene, and impressed with the easy grace with which she handles it. The scenes between Streep as the elegant Graham and Hanks as the hard-nosed Bradlee as pure acting gold, but the whole film is sprinkled with such gems.

THE POST is one of the best films of the past year, an essential must-see, and a worthy companion piece to ALL THE KINGS MEN on the free press, but this gripping thriller has as much to say about present days as the historical moment in which it is set.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars