Inspirational sports movies don’t come much better than this one. Norwegian director Joachim Rønning has swum similar fact-based waters before, with 2012’s rugged and equally compelling “Kon-Tiki.” But this new film has a sparkling buoyance courtesy of its strongest asset: an effervescent and thoroughly persuasive performance by star Daisy Ridley.
She’s radiant . Jeff Nathanson’s script, adapted from Glenn Stout’s 2009 non-fiction book of the same title, massages a few minor details but is rigorously authentic with respect to the significant events of Trudy Ederle’s life and career. Indeed, she became so astonishingly famous, for her time, that it’s incomprehensible that obscurity claimed her until only recently.
(In a recent article for the London Daily Telegraph, journalist Simon Briggs cheekily compares her to champion racehorse Seabiscuit, who in the late 1930s was just as celebrated as Ederle had been in the 1920s ...
but similarly vanished from the historical record until being profiled in Laura Hillenbrand’s sensational 1999 best-seller, which in turn prompted a 2003 film.) Rønning’s film opens in 1910, in a German neighborhood in Manhattan, New York. Five-year-old Trudy (Olive Abercrombie) unexpectedly survives a bout with measles: an illness that coincides with the PS General Slocum steamboat tragedy, which caught fire and sank in the East River, killing 1,021 people.
Most were women and children, who remained on the boat because they couldn�.
