Christopher Eccleston

Young Woman and the Sea

03/06/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

As true stories go, few are as inspiring as that of Trudy Ederle, who in 1926 was the first woman to swim the English Channel. If it sounds a bit so-so now, when so many people have managed it, consider how difficult it must have been in an era where there was little in the way of swim technology – and at a time when women were expected to stay quietly at home and look after the family.

We’re first introduced to young Trudy (Olive Abercrombie) in 1914 when she’s suffering from a bout of measles that’s expected to kill her. Out in New York harbour, a fire on a passenger boat has killed a large number of people, most of them women, who burned to death because none of them had ever been taught to swim. When Trudy makes a miraculous recovery from her illness, her indefatigable mother, Gertrude (Jeanette Hain), decides that Trudy (now played by Daisy Ridley) and her sister, Margaret (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), shall have swimming lessons, even though the concept is virtually unheard of. The girls’ father, Henry (Kim Bodnia), a butcher by trade, doesn’t encourage the idea. He would rather see his daughters married with kids at the earliest opportunity and preferably to other German butchers. Whatever will these women want next? The vote?

Luckily, the girls fall under the influence of fearless swimming trainer Charlotte (Sian Clifford), who can see no logical reason why women shouldn’t be allowed to swim competitively and, sure enough, they take to the sport like… ahem… ducks to water. Trudy soon has her eyes on bigger prizes and even gets to take part in the 1924 Summer Olympics – but her determination stretches to different horizons and she’s very aware that, so far at least, no woman has ever swum across the English Channel…

This is a Disney film, but screenwriter Jeff Nathanson mostly manages to steer clear of the schmaltz, only occasionally flirting with it in the shallows. Of course, there has to be a villain in a film like this, and that duty falls to Christopher Eccleston (sporting a spectacularly dodgy Glaswegian accent) as Jabez Wolffe, the man picked to be Trudy’s trainer for her first attempt. A failed channel swimmer himself (22 attempts!), Wolffe is clearly the wrong man for the job and it’s hardly surprising that the enterprise is doomed to failure – but then Trudy falls in with Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham), the second man to make it across (in 1911!), who can see her potential and is prepared to pick up where Wolffe left off.

The rest, as they say, is history, but director Joachim Rønning does a spectacular job of creating almost unbearable suspense even though the ending is a matter of record. And Trudy’s epic swim, through bad weather, stinging jellyfish and – worst of all – almost total darkness, makes for an absorbing and compelling experience in the cinema.

How well this will fare in a summer where some excellent films are failing to find an audience is anybody’s guess, but as ever, it’s worth catching this one on the big screen before it drifts on by.

4.3 stars

Philip Caveney

Legend

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11/09/15

Brian Helgeland’s take on the Kray twins is a curate’s egg of a film; good in parts, but not good enough overall to deserve the welter of four star reviews it has received. Mind you, the Guardian’s two star appraisal was probably a bit harsh, though the publicity generated by the film’s publicists, who cunningly made it look like a four star on the poster surely deserves some kind of special award for chutzpah (see image). Unlike the previous attempt at filming this story (famously starring Gary and Martin Kemp) this version begins with the twins at the height of their powers in London’s East End and is narrated by Frances (Emily Browning) the troubled teenager who ends up as Reggie Kray’s long-suffering wife. Right from the beginning, this is a problem because Frances is actually a rather dull character and we really don’t learn enough about her to fully empathise with her plight, even when her misery turns to tragedy.

On the plus side, we get two Tom Hardys for the price of one. He is, of course, an extraordinary actor and he manages to portray the two very different brothers with swaggering conviction – but it has to be said that his characterisation of Ronnie Kray is largely comedic (brilliantly so in a scene where he attempts to dance to Strangers In The Night) but I felt distinctly uneasy to hear an audience laughing out loud at the utterances of an unabashed psychopath. Call me old fashioned, but that just felt wrong.

There’s a reasonable attempt here to recreate the 60s backdrop, replete with a vintage soundtrack, but the script fails to fully explore some important characters in the story. Christopher Eccleston as Nipper Read, the copper pledged with the difficult task of bringing the Krays to justice is (if you’ll forgive the pun) criminally underused and so is Tara Fitzgerald as Frances’s mother, a woman who famously wore black to her daughter’s wedding.

There are some extremely violent set pieces – a gang fight in a pub, where hammers are put to inappropriate use, and the famous murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, but they are filmed with a kind of cartoonish zeal that somehow undermines their severity and inevitably, glamourises the ‘pay up or get duffed up’ world in which the Krays operated. Again, I felt conflicted by this. Surely villains should be scorned, not paraded as role models?

All-in-all then, this feels like a missed opportunity. After viewing the trailer, I’d expected to love this film, but I came away feeling that it should have (and easily could have) been so much better than it actually was.

3.2 stars

Philip Caveney