Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Young Woman and the Sea’ on Disney+, an Old-Fashioned Biopic of Endurance Swimmer Gertrude Ederle

Young Woman and the Sea (now streaming on Disney+) biopicicizes Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Directed by Joachim Ronning (Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales) and adapting a biography by author Glenn Stout, this is the second recent movie about a female swimmer of note, following 2023’s Diane Nyad bio Nyad. So yes, this is a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie about Someone Who Did Something Significant And/Or Inspiring, and it’s also a period picture, following her life from roughly 1914 to 1926 – which is a way of saying, hey, batten down the hatches, you’re about to watch a whole bunch of montages!

YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: FRAMING DEVICE ALERT: Gertrude (Daisy Ridley) stands on the shore, her skin smeared with lard, looking out at the raging sea. She sings “Ain’t We Got Fun” to herself. She almost didn’t make it to this point: Flashback to New York City, 1914. Trudy’s a kid (played by Olive Abercrombie), in bed, deathly ill with the measles. The doctor’s assessment? She won’t make it through the night. Her parents, Henry (Kim Bodnia) and Gertrude (Jeanette Hain), sit vigil downstairs. The morning comes and… Trudy walks down the steps and declares herself to be hungry. The fever broke. Relief! A miracle? The movie almost certainly wants us to think so. 

In the wake of a ship that sank and resulted in many women drowning because they couldn’t swim, Gertrude wants Trudy and her sister Meg (Lilly Aspell as a child, Tilda Cobham-Hervey as an adult) to learn how. “Indecent for a girl!” is Henry’s idiotic reply, because he’s a staunch traditionalist who believes women should be in the kitchen and should work in his butcher shop and should let him arrange their marriages and should die if they fall in the water. And so Trudy sings “Ain’t We Got Fun” over and over and over and over and over again until her father relents. We jump to teenageish Trudy and Meg, montage montage, they meet swim instructor Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford, bellowing KICK YA FEET KICK YA FEET in a Noo Yawk accent), the sisters swim in a little indoor pool, they swim around the pier at Coney Island and win free hot dogs, montage, their parents worry about Trudy’s measles-damaged ears, montage, she shows significant skill and speed in a race and eventually ends up competing in the 1924 Olympics in Paris.

Throughout all this, sexism reigns. Henry tries to marry her off, and she resists. All the swimming honchos – men, of course – don’t let the women train like the male competitors do, and their Olympics performances are therefore disappointing. One day, Trudy hears about a thousand-pound prize being offered for anyone who swims the English Channel, and she drums up support and sponsorship by swimming seven miles from New York to New Jersey. Off she goes to France, where the honchos push aside Charlotte so Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), who failed to cross the Channel himself and isn’t particularly fond of the thought of women doing things that men do, can be her trainer. She’s inspired by Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham), a lovable nut who successfully swam the Channel, and prefers to swim with his bare ass out. Will there be scenes in which Trudy takes to the chilly water as everyone back home in New York gathers around their radios breathlessly awaiting updates? Will she face serious adversity? Will she make all those sexist bungholes look stupid? You already know these answers!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Three recent BOATS movies with actual boats in them: Young Woman and the Sea, Nyad and Boys in the Boat. The latter is very similar in its cheesy period-picture trappings, and also makes use of “Ain’t We Got Fun.”

Performance Worth Watching: Ridley’s wide-eyed, beaming earnestness is easily the movie’s strongest asset.

Memorable Dialogue: Trudy: “I look at Meg and the other girls – I don’t know how to be like them.”

Sex and Skin: Just Burgess’ nude posterior.

Our Take: Young Woman and the Sea boasts impressive period detail, excellent cinematography and special effects, and a winning performance by Ridley. The supporting roles are well-cast. It’s a warm, heartfelt and incredibly old-fashioned tribute to the real Trudy Ederle. It recognizes the remarkable achievements of a woman, propping her up as a righteous symbol running parallel to the U.S. women’s suffrage movement. There are some mildly harrowing moments as Trudy guts out a treacherous swim through a field of stinging jellyfish, and has to navigate a stretch of her swim in the dark without her watchdog boat alongside her, and Ronning ably amplifies the drama by generating an air of existential fear. It’s a nice movie. 

But is “nice” a pejorative? Yeah, kinda. Like Boys in the Boat, about a Depression Era team of hardscrabble rowers who outpaced a heavily favored Nazi squad at the Olympics, Young Woman is frustratingly shallow, broad-stroked and manipulative. These films, with their pushy musical scores, simplistic conflicts and thin characters, are engineered to be inspiring, shamelessly so. Pushing such feelgood isn’t necessarily ill-intentioned, but it lends itself to the indulgence of cliches and risible corniness that may find you digging in your heels and rolling your eyes. 

Nyad portrayed its subject as a prickly egotist who forces us to admire her accomplishments more than her personality; Ederle isn’t granted such complexity. She says she doesn’t “know how to be like” other women, and that’s as deep as her character gets. The film is content to push rah-rah feminism in big, bold terms, to push back at women-belong-in-the-kitchen assertions by surrounding Trudy with archetypes: Controlling men (her father and coaches), inspiring figures (Epstein as an early supporter, Burgess as an ally), random little girls who come up to her and say they want to be like her. It’s not the portrait of gritty, obsessive focus like it feels like it should be, and is as slick as a dolphin’s snout. You’ll probably want to like this movie more than you do, and its well-meaning overtures may find you talking yourself into being an apologist for it – such is my conundrum. But for a movie that seems to want to pay homage to a feminist icon, it renders her little more than an endurance-swimmer action figure with KICK-YA-FEET action. 

Our Call: “Action figure” instead of “doll” is a purposeful word choice. It’s not nothing. Some will find more value in Young Woman and the Sea’s dramatization of that historical baby step, but I found it disappointing, a shade or three too hokey for its own good. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.