The Novice
If she fought the shark from Jaws, my money would be
on her for the win
dir: Lauren Hadaway
2021
Finally, a film that’s honest about the scam that is university rowing.
I don’t know that anyone else was curious about why there are so many people being yelled at as they yank on their oars at 5 in the morning. I have only ever seen these people training when I have, in days long gone, been stumbling home along the river to Richmond after having been up all night.
And I thought it looked like hell twenty years ago. And this film confirms that it’s even more horrible than I thought.
The Novice is the feature debut of director Lauren Hadaway, and it’s a surprisingly confident, disturbing, unsettling and discomforting film. It isn’t too much of a stretch to refer to Whiplash in the same breath as this flick, since both films feature competitive worlds and people going the extra mile (or three thousand extra miles) in order to achieve their ambitions.
Plus Hadaway worked on Whiplash, in her capacity as a sound engineer. This flick is significantly different, in that whatever the main character’s motivations and ambitions were, the key sources of drama were the machinations and actions of the piece of shit teacher who tormented the poor drummer, and made him feel like he had to destroy himself in order to earn the teacher’s respect.
In other words, the motivations, the threats were external. This flick hasn’t been seen by as many people, and isn’t going to get either JK Simmons or the main character here, Alex Dall as played by Isabelle Fuhrman, any Academy Award nominations. But the main dramas, motivations, sources of torment are coming from inside the character study. From inside Alex.
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