Based on Glenn Stout’s nonfiction account of the same title, “Young Woman and the Sea” gets by on the careful engineering of clichés, Daisy Ridley and a really good piece of irresistibly rousing history. In 1926, 20-year-old Gertrude Ederle, raised in a German immigrant household in New York City, swam the English Channel in 14 hours and 31 minutes. She bested the previous record-holder, a male, by two hours and became the first female athlete to make the crossing.
Two million people turned out for her ticker-tape parade. President Calvin Coolidge called her “America’s best girl.” After decades and centuries of patriarchal whining about women, swimming and the galling impropriety of the words “women” and “swimming” in close proximity, Ederle’s feat changed the course of athletics.
The movie tidies things up for its tour of Ederle’s life, focused by screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (“Catch Me If You Can,” the forthcoming “Lion King” prequel “Mufasa”) on 15 or so of the subject’s first 20 years. Trudy, as Gertrude was called by some, initially was not the most talented swimmer in the family; her older sister, Meg, was. That shifted soon enough; by the early 1920s, and Trudy’s late teens, she was the most famous female athlete in America, winning gold and bronze medals in the 1924 Paris Olympics.
An initial go at the Channel crossing proved unsuccessful, and (some say) actively sabotaged by Ederle’s coach, Jabez Wolffe, who’d himself atte.