I tend to have a soft spot for true-story films about people who beat seemingly impossible odds — whether those odds were logistical, physical, or emotional — to accomplish something extraordinary. It’s why Apollo 13 and First Man are among some of my favorite movies, and why I enjoyed last year’s swimming epic Nyad. Young Woman and the Sea follows a historical precursor to Diana Nyad’s swim across the Straits of Florida. In 1926, at just 20 years of age, Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle (played here by Daisy Ridley) became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. The film emphasizes not only the physical demands of such a swim, but also the misogyny of the time period which reared its ugly head at every turn. It’s an important story, well-told by director Joachim Rønning and his talented cast.
Trudy miraculously beat measles as a child. While I can’t speak to every plot point’s historical accuracy (though there are some that are distinctly inaccurate), the scene where she first seems out of the woods health-wise is surprisingly one of the funniest and sweetest movie moments we’re likely to see this year, thanks in large part to Olive Elise Abercrombie’s performance as young Trudy. It nicely sets the tone for how well the film will deploy comedy down the line. As Trudy and her sister Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) grow up in 1910s/20s New York City, daughters of German immigrants, they start to fall in love with swimming, partly because they are initially discouraged from doing so simply because they are women.
Due to health concerns, Trudy is made to stoke the furnace at their slightly-clandestine women’s swimming class while Meg swims. But when finally given the chance, Trudy proves to be the best swimmer of the bunch, soon even competing in the 1924 Olympics in Paris, where she wins a gold medal and two bronzes. We’re made to believe that this isn’t quite the level of success Trudy was hoping for, but when she returns home, the sexism she faces totally rings true. Having already accomplished so much at such a young age and clearly deserving more opportunities, the unceremonious shutting down of the US Olympic women’s swim team and her father Henry’s (Kim Bodnia) desire to either have her married off or continue to simply just work in his butcher shop with no other ambitions hold Trudy in a place of frustration. But she soon turns professional and finds sponsorship for her dream, the English Channel swim.
She’s initially paired with Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), a Scottish swimmer who tried and failed 22 times to swim the Channel. He is in cahoots with Trudy’s sponsor to ensure she doesn’t succeed. When her first attempt fails, she stays in France (a glaring inaccuracy; she actually returned to New York before her second attempt) and trains with Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham), an iconoclastic Brit who successfully swam the Channel in 1911.
Like Nyad, Young Woman stresses the physical perils and dangers of such a swim. Daisy Ridley (who’s also fantastic in the recent Sometimes I Think About Dying — a sweeter film about depression than that title might suggest) wonderfully embodies Trudy’s determination, and so we fully believe in her candor and perseverance throughout the entire endeavor. She’s buffeted by Jeanette Hain, who plays Trudy’s mother, also named Gertrude. Hain really is the glue that holds much of the film’s tone together. As she listens to the radio anxiously for news of her daughter, the film’s well-written balance of knowing family comedy and against-all-odds drama often requires the most nuanced performance from Hain in particular, and she delivers spectacularly.
Rønning and his crew also do a nice job of photographing the swim sequences, sometimes coming up with new kinds of 360-degree underwater-to-air shots that I truly have never seen before. This lends an air of excitement and credibility to the spectacle of strength and fortitude we’re witnessing. Though the film never quite escapes its issues of slight historical inaccuracy, it hits the mark for being uplifting and even soaring at points. Not even high tide can hold down the magnitude of Trudy Ederle’s accomplishment. | George Napper
