Review: 'Young Woman and the Sea' gives Daisy Ridley a chance to shine, playing a real sports hero of another era

As old-fashioned inspirational sports stories go, “Young Woman and the Sea” goes pretty well — a charming, if undemanding, story of a lone athlete battling the currents, the long odds and a society that has to be shown the value of a female hero.

Daisy Ridley, our current leading Jedi, stars as Trudy Ederle — who made world headlines 98 years ago by becoming (spoiler alert!) the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel. It was a feat that a Jazz Age world marveled at, and 20 years later was still worthy of discussion. (It earned a mention in the 1944 horse drama “National Velvet.”) 

The movie starts in 1914, with 9-year-old Trudy (played by Olive Abercrombie), the younger daughter of German immigrants Henry (Kim Bodnia), a butcher, and Gertrud (Jeanette Hain), who brought in money with her sewing. Trudy suffers a bout of the measles, getting so sick that the doctor predicts her death, but rallies back to health. 

Shortly thereafter, when Mom insists her older daughter, Meg (played by Lilly Aspell as a young girl), learns to swim, Trudy isn’t allowed into the pool, for fear that she could spread measles to the other kids. Instead, Trudy and Meg — portrayed as young adults by Ridley and Tilda Cobham-Hervey (who played Helen Reddy in the 2019 biopic “I Am Woman”) — challenge each other by swimming around the pier at Coney Island. 

Then Meg is given a chance to compete for a women’s swim team — a rarity in the ‘20s — but the coach, Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford, from “Fleabag”), doesn’t think Trudy has the form to become a fast swimmer. As the viewers have already learned, telling Trudy she can’t is a sure-fire way of ensuring that she will. In short order, she’s breaking swimming records and earning a spot on the 1924 U.S Olympic team in Paris.

Meg, however, is not going on the journey. Instead, Meg is following the path her parents have set out for her — the only path available to women then, the movie tells us — by marrying the apprentice butcher her parents have selected for her. 

Preparing for the Olympics, Trudy learns that the head of the American governing body, James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler) — who only reluctantly is approving a women’s team to compete in Paris — has chosen a male coach, Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), to lead the women swimmers. But Wolffe is more concerned about preserving the women’s chastity on the voyage over than letting them train, so Trudy’s showing in Paris is less than expected.

After the Olympics, though, Trudy doesn’t want to quit swimming, and announces to her family that she will swim the English Channel. Again her obstacles are Sullivan’s chauvinism and Wolffe’s mule-headed thinking about the right way to swim the Channel — which he has attempted a dozen times. “How many successfully?” Trudy asks cheekily. Meanwhile, Trudy gains the respect of the veteran male swimmers who brave the Channel, including the eccentric William Burgess (Stephe Graham), the second man to successfully make the crossing.

Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson — a Disney pro who wrote the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie and the remake of “The Lion King” — adapts Glenn Stout’s biography of Ederle into the sort of square-jawed, one person against the system biopic that you thought Hollywood didn’t make any more. The stilted dialogue and melodramatic plotting feels like something out of another cinematic era, closer to Trudy’s 1926 than to our 2024.

The Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, has also come up through the Disney machine — he co-directed “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” and directed “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” — and hit the story rhythms reliably if not always subtly. Rønning’s work shines in the actual channel crossing, giving Ridley space to capture the physical and psychological strains of the endeavor. 

There will be an inevitable comparison between Ridley’s performance here and Annette Bening’s Oscar-nominated turn in “Nyad.” In the water, it’s about even. The difference is how each actor takes on the role on dry land — and Ridley is given less to work with playing the sweet-natured Trudy than Bening got with the more prickly Diana Nyad.

It would be easy to dismiss “Young Woman and the Sea” as a Disney-style piece of wholesome family entertainment, with the rough edges smoothed down for all-ages viewing. But in its best moments, focusing on Ridley’s Trudy and her determination and her family bonds, the movie comes out a winner.

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‘Young Woman and the Sea’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 31, in theaters. Rated PG for thematic elements, some language and partial nudity. Running time: 129 minutes.