At every step in Joachim Rønning’s (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Kon-Tiki) gripping old-school adaptation of Glenn Stout’s non-fiction book, Young Woman and the Sea, Daisy Ridley’s based-on-real-life Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle faces a whole host of obstacles, only one greater and more significant than the treacherous 21-mile-long English Channel Ederle hoped to cross almost a century ago: the invisible patriarchal structure that surrounds Trudy, threatening to suffocate her aquatic dreams.
When we first meet Trudy, she’s face-to-face with the crashing waves of the English Channel, her body covered in heat-preserving grease, her eyes lingering on the far horizon. Moments later, Rønning deftly hits the rewind button, taking us back to Trudy’s preteen days.
The second daughter of working-class German immigrants, Trudy (Olive Abercrombie) lives with her siblings and parents, Henry (Kim Bodnia) and Gertrud (Jeanette Hain). Her more traditionally-minded father, a butcher by trade, can’t see Trudy beyond her gender and her assigned future as a working-class wife and mother. Her less conventional mother and homemaker, however, sees Trudy’s drive, ambition, and enthusiasm as something to be encouraged and nurtured.
Throughout Young Woman and the Sea’s two-hour-plus running time, those two opposing worldviews come into constant conflict as Trudy’s interest in the ocean and swimming turns into a lifelong obsession steadily breaks down every barrier, first to swimming (girls aren’t allowed), later to competitive swimming (including the 1924 Paris Olympics), and finally the momentous, life-defining decision to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Sometimes the obstacles are simply material (i.e., resources), but more often than not, those obstacles appear in the form of the sexist, misogynistic men who stand in Trudy’s way, both figuratively and literally.
After overcoming her father’s repeated recalcitrance and her own self-doubts, Trudy faces resistance from James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler), the head of the American Olympic Committee, Jabez Wolffe (an all but unrecognizable Christopher Eccleston), a frustrated, faithless swimming coach assigned to train Trudy, and at least initially, the all-male swimming club who congregate at a beachside hotel on the French shore. Like Trudy, each member of the club hopes to swim across the English Channel. It’s at that French hotel that Trudy — and through Trudy, the audience — directly learns about the life-or-death stakes involved in crossing the English Channel, not just in failure, but in disappearing under the waves and losing her life like so many others.
A relatively standard, straightforward biopic by any definition, Young Woman and the Sea contains few surprises narrative-wise, following the tropes, rules, and conventions of the genre. As Rønning repeatedly proves, however, formula can be elevated through a combination of craftsmanship (his), a poignant, moving screenplay (Jeff Nathanson’s), and uniformly strong, tonally perfect performances starting — and ending — with Ridley as the adult, often socially awkward Trudy, at home more in the water than on land, driven in part by her desire to escape gender norms as much as the spirit of exploration typical of early 20th-century adventurers who reached the North or South Poles or crossed the Atlantic in a single-seat, single-engine airplane.
Young Woman and the Sea opens today, only in movie theaters, via Disney.