Young Woman and the Sea

Joachim Rønning apparently cannot stay out of the water. The Norwegian director caught the film world’s notice along with creative partner Espen Sandberg for the Oscar and Golden Globe-nominated 2012 Pacific Ocean survival drama Kon-Tiki. The pair subsequently heard the sirens’ song on 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Since then, Rønning has sailed solo and exclusively at Disney.

Rønning’s previous film for the family entertainment giant was Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, an inconsequential blip of a sequel released during Disney’s banner 2019 in between such behemoths as Avengers: Endgame, Toy Story 4, Jon Favreau’s photorealistic The Lion King, Frozen II, and Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker.

What a difference five years can make. Today, Disney is struggling to attract moviegoers, having gone all in on streaming and finding their once infallible acquisitions Marvel and Lucasfilm are no longer guaranteed box office gold. Pixar, the standard on every level for feature animation since 1995, recently laid off 14% of their workforce over creative and commercial disappointments. Wish, meant to celebrate 100 years of Disney animation, put up numbers comparable to the lowly Home on the Range without adjusting for twenty years of inflation.

Thanks in part to last year’s strikes, Disney barely has even attempted to rebound in 2024. The studio’s output this year has been limited to anniversary rereleases of Fox’s Alien and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, the blink and miss spring horror misfire The First Omen, too-little too-late theatrical engagements for Pixar’s straight-to-streaming Luca, Soul, and Turning Red, and, most recently, the 20th Century Studios-branded Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Disney’s ranking among the major studios will not be impacted in any way by Rønning’s newest movie, The Young Woman and the Sea, a dramatization of the athletic achievements of Trudy Ederle, an American who made history by becoming the first woman and the fastest human being to traverse the English Channel.

There’s not a lot more to this than that one-sentence synopsis. Trudy grows up in 1910s New York as one of three children of hardworking German immigrants, defeating the measles at a young age. As a child (played by Olive Abercrombie), Trudy longs to swim, something her butcher father, along with most of society, opposes. Stern mother Gertrud (Jeanette Hain) takes Trudy and her sister Margaret to be trained, paying the princely sum of $2 a week out of her own pocket. Soon, the sisters (now played by Star Wars‘ Daisy Ridley and Tilda Cobham-Hervey) are competing and the initially doubted Trudy is winning and setting world records.

Trudy alone is invited to compete in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, where her out-of-touch coach (a disarmingly old Christopher Eccleston) does not give her sufficient training. The prospect of female swimmers is about as risible to 1920s America as the notion of an anchorwoman was to San Diego’s Channel 4 News Team in the ’70s. But, you don’t get an inspirational biopic a hundred years later by giving up, so Trudy perseveres, convincing a close-minded patron (Glenn Fleshler) to sponsor a dangerous journey across the 21-mile English Channel. He reluctantly agrees, with the stipulation that Trudy’s Olympic coach be the one to train her.

When that undertaking falls short (under sketchy circumstances), Trudy leaps out of her boat back to America to try again, this time with news-making and scene-making Englishman Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham) by her side.

Familiar and corny, Young Woman plays like a sober feature-length version of a “Drunk History” segment. Without inebriated voiceover and stunt casting, this is a standard issue sports movie, one that feels a generation behind the times even if its “girl power” theme implies a post-#MeToo greenlight.

Disney embraced the inspirational true sports drama at the beginning of the century, with the racial harmony-promoting Jerry Bruckheimer productions Remember the Titans and Glory Road and adjacent efforts like Miracle, The Rookie, and Invincible. The studio moved away from those around the time that Bob Iger first took over as CEO back in 2006. Bob has always believed in brands and inspirational sports dramas apparently did not qualify as one of those for him. Bruckheimer moved mostly to sequels in the commercially formidable Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure lines, with aspiring new tentpoles G-Force, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Prince of Persia and The Lone Ranger falling short. Young Woman brings Bruckheimer back to the Disney lot for the first time since Dead Men Tell No Tales, but it is no return to form.

On a purely commercial level, Young Woman is clearly destined for disappointment, with a major disclaimer. The movie was intended to debut on Disney+, where audience numbers would remain shrouded and it would exist simply as a subscription incentive/reward. But, after reportedly positive test screenings, the film will now first receive a limited theatrical release this Friday, a weekend with minimal competition beyond underperforming holdovers The Garfield Movie and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and the barely better-received IF. Whatever Disney’s modest enagement brings in will be gravy and with budget information nowhere to be found, this appears to be a more artistic undertaking than a financial one, given the period setting and general malaise to non-event moviegoing.

Unfortunately, Young Woman does not impress all that much artistically either, apart from some expected technical polish. Rønning and erratic screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can, Speed 2: Cruise Control) try their darndest to give Trudy’s story some personality and color. They try to develop a kinship between her and her sister. They try to mine laughs from the traditional father, stoic mother, and the scantily-clad Burgess. But the jokes always fall flat if you’re not literally watching this for a family movie night convinced that “Hollyweird doesn’t make ’em like they used to.” They don’t, but here, it’s hard to argue that they should. This is more on the order of Secretariat than Cool Runnings. Of last year’s offerings, it most resembles George Clooney’s rowing throwback The Boys in the Boat and, even more directly in narrative, Netflix’s Nyad. Neither of those were particularly remarkable.

Rønning’s film ends up in the same middling place as those, only slightly more banal by skewing younger and lighter. Given a more substantial leading role than Mark Hamill ever got in live-action post-Skywalker, Ridley is almost shockingly flavorless. She got this part because her recent Star Wars trilogy is well-known and quite well-regarded by the public, in contrast to the negativity that increasingly surrounds it online. On the heels of this and last year’s lifeless The Marsh King’s Daughter, her upcoming return to Star Wars makes more sense. Being front and center of a biopic often lends to a breakout performance, but Ridley’s just okay lead turn here robs us of a major discovery and of the film realizing its dramatic potential.