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.
You could be wondering why, especially for the first half hour, why everything is so tense and seems so harsh – a student at a university decides she wants to be the best at something she’s never done before that no-one really supports her in doing, and she exercises until she throws up or passes out. We don’t actually find out why until later in the flick – and It’s an answer that illuminates nothing but explains that Alex is motivated by spite more than anything else. Before that moment, we just feel that Alex is really committed. After that we know Alex is so blindly determined that she will happily destroy herself (maybe ‘happily’ isn’t the word I’m looking for, she will more likely do it while screaming and with blood streaming from her torn hands) in her pursuit of being better at something than people think she can be.
She is anti-social, rarely bothers with anything if it isn’t furthering her rowing ambitions, and doesn’t really look past the “I” in “team”, not caring about any of the other people around her. She seems to have one other friend on the team, like her, a novice called Jamie (Amy Forsyth), but for most of the flick’s length I wasn’t even sure she existed – I wondered whether they were going to pull a Tyler Durden / Black Swan and show that she was an alternate identity that wasn’t really there.
Where Jamie differs from Alex is that she’s capable of relating to the other women on the team, and gets along with them, but also is motivated because she needs to achieve a certain level of success in order to be eligible for a scholarship to cover the costs of her education. Alex doesn’t have that necessity at all.
Had she had that financial need, well, that would have been a bit of a cop out. Audiences would be able to relate to that as a motivation. But that’s not where Alex is coming from. She needs to win, she needs to be better than the others just so she can say “ha, see, you said I wasn’t good enough, and I was better than ALL of you.”
In a different flick, with a different soundtrack and editing, Alex would be the hero. Her journey, however difficult, would be inspirational. We would yearn for her to embody decent sportsmanlike behavior, noble values and reaffirming the Protestant work ethic / American ideals of self-discipline, stick-to-ativeness, elbow grease and grim determination, so that we, too, would feel elated when she finally achieves her inevitable triumph over her rivals.
That’s not this story. There are a lot of synonyms with a darker edge to them, with a darker nuance that we are drawn to apply instead to describe her journey, and none of them are noble virtues.
If anything, this flick has more in common with something like Saint Maud, where someone tries to achieve an almost religious ecstasy through the destruction of their own body.
Alex not only spends long hours rowing back and forth on a machine trying to improve her best times, or rowing on her own, on the river, on freezing mornings pre-dawn, but we eventually see her hitting herself and self-mutilating with scissors, which we get the impression she’s been doing for years.
The working out is so intense at one stage she passes out and pisses herself, making her even more of a pariah among the other rowers and feared by the coaches. Instead of sympathising with her, I think we feel even more worried, because her sociopathic zeal keeps increasing, and we wonder what new extreme, what nastier new level she will go to in order to feel like she’s made it.
It doesn’t help that she’s often hearing the whispering of the people arrayed against her, and even the birds are mocking her, she feels, telling her she’ll never make it. Also, once she’s told that the euphemism for fucking up in rowing is “to catch a crab”, she starts seeing crabs everywhere; big bastards, sometimes just hanging out, sometimes being boiled alive without realising.
It’s not a comfortable character portrait, and nor should it be. Alex, for all her paranoia, is treated appallingly by the other girls, who ostracise her long before her actions could be said to have justified it. Right from the start they keep telling her to sit further away or at more distant rowing machines because she’s a novice, the starting state for all new rowers.
And yet her dejected acceptance of these slights is contrasted with how her one friend (not for long) reacts, which is to tell those jerks “fuck you, we’re all on the same team, I’m not moving”, and she’s accepted for it, if not celebrated.
If we have any doubts at the end as to how far Alex is willing to go in order to beat the other girls (especially her former friend) at a particular race (one which doesn’t matter, which is meant to be fun, which gets no prize or scholarship or trophy or advancement or anything), Alex dispels all reasonable notions and shows us she’d happily destroy herself, the world and everyone else just because. Just because.
That is chilling. It’s terrifying stuff. There’s no winking at the audience, there’s no sly cunning. It’s just raw brutality.
The ending may be somewhat ambiguous as to what exactly Alex has done, or is deciding to do, or what exactly happened leading up to and including the context of the final scene, but we’re left with no doubt that Alex is a very dangerous person, and crossing her or even mildly irritating her is probably not a good idea.
This is a towering performance from Isabelle Fuhrman, who, as far as I can tell, is best known for playing the main character (many years ago, when she was a child) in the bonkers horror flick Orphan, which still has by far one of the most insane twists in movie history. She is so great that now is the only time I’ve been curious to check out the Orphan: First Kill sequel / prequel that came out a few months ago, and will do so based on how incredible her performance is here.
She is never less than steely eyed here. The one time she seems like she’s breaking down and confessing to her girlfriend what her true history is and what being driven means to her, it’s not a break down, if anything, it convinces her to be become even more extreme in everything she does. The difference between her and other characters in other flicks is that the world eventually goes along with their vision, agrees that they were right all along, and rewards them accordingly, for never having given up.
Here the cold world remains indifferent, and she keeps going anyway. She is less like the mythical Sisyphus rolling that rock up the hill every day, only to have it roll back down at each day’s end, and more like someone rolling that rock up again and again until she can build up enough arm strength to rip off the heads of the gods.
The Novice – pray that you don’t cut her off in traffic or get served at a café before her.
8 times universities with rowing teams are over-compensating for something out of 10
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“You know the funny thing about teams, which you actually wouldn't understand seeing as you've never been on a team, is that you don't have to like each other. But you do have to respect each other.” – spoken like someone captured by the whole Big Team industrial complex - The Novice
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