Last night I colored outside the lines and spent $5.99 to rent the movie, "Boys in the Boat" on Amazon Prime. Please hear me say this a movie worth more than the price of admission. I recently blogged about the book, and I was mentally prepared to think the movie would fall short of expectations. At some level, I enjoyed the movie more than the book because it did not include the back stories of some of the young men who made the rowing team.
Joe Rantz, was a kid from a hard place. He valued education and he had anything other than a normalized childhood. His mother died from throat cancer when he was four years old. His father sent him to live with an aunt.
Three years later, the father married a woman with four younger children. In case your wondering, blended families don't always blend. His dad's wife did not want Joe living with them. Joe was a good student and mostly tried to stay out of the way.
When he was ten, he got into conflict with one of his stepmother's children and at her instance his father made arrangements for Joe to stay at the one-room school he attended. The school agreed for him to stay overnight in exchange for doing some assigned tasks including cutting firewood. He hunted, fished, and did odd jobs to buy food to eat. Did I mention that he was ten-years old at the time?
His family subsequently moved 65 miles from Seattle a year later and took Joe with them. The family's financial situation was not good. At the age of 15, Joe came home from school to learn that the family was moving to an undisclosed location. They had made the decision not to take Joe with them.
For the next two years, he lived in a half-finished cabin in the woods and logged timber, built fences, baled hay, and cleared tree stumps to support himself while staying in school. Joe had an older brother who married and got a job teaching school at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. He intervened by inviting Joe to live with them. Without having to worry where his next meal was coming from, Joe participated in sports and was very accomplished. He graduated from Roosevelt High School.
Follow graduation from high school, he worked for year to save money for college. Initially, he got a job paving highways, but left that for a higher risk job that paid more money. He helped with the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. His sixty-hour work week included rappelling down cliffs and while dangling in mid-air, used a jack hammer to clear rocks from the mountain side.
The movie makes no reference to any of the aforementioned information. There is a scene in the movie where Joe is with his girlfriend in a restaurant, he as he looked through the window, he saw his father parked on the street across from the restaurant. He excused himself and went to talk with his dad. His dad said their move had not worked out and his family had moved back to town two years earlier. During that period of time, no effort was made to locate Joe.
One of the other things described in the book, but not referenced in the movie is that the team rowed in the early hours of the morning and much of the time, the temperature was below freezing. I can't imagine.
I'm giving the movie and exceptional rating.
All My Best!
Don
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