“The Swimmers” is inspired by the true story of teenage Olympic athlete and Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini who, in 2015, along with her sister Sara and two others, dragged a boat full of fellow refugees across the Aegean sea. After the girls made it to Germany, Yusra was selected along with ten others to compete with the Refugee Olympic Team at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Her story is undeniably heroic, which makes the mediocrity of the Netflix film of her life story all the more disappointing.
Director Sally El Hosaini (“My Brother The Devil”) took over the reins from Stephan Daldry, whose 9/11 drama “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is perhaps an all-time low in well-meaning but ultimately hollow Best Picture nominees. Daldry remains credited as an executive producer, and his fingerprints linger all over the production. Hosaini also shares co-writing credit with Jack Thorne (“Wonder,” “Enola Holmes”), and unfortunately, much of the film’s failings start at the script level.
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What should be a humanizing biography of a woman with a larger-than-life story gets distilled into a movie split into two generic parts: a harrowing adventure and an inspirational sports story, both with Yusra and her sister Sara ostensibly at the center. Real-life sisters Manal Issa and Nathalie Issa do the best they can with the material, but the script rarely lets us truly understand who the sisters are as individuals, focusing mostly on the highlight beats of their shared story. The casting of real sisters does come with their undeniable chemistry. The film shines brightest when it focuses on their relationship, although even that is often hampered by hamfisted dialogue.
Pushed towards Olympic dreams by their father (Ali Suliman, “Paradise Now”), a one-time professional swimmer who had to give up his own dreams due to his mandatory military service, who now acts as their swim coach, and supported by their loving mother (Kinda Alloush), the girls are positioned as opposites from the beginning. As the civil war begins to rage, Yusra maintains focus on swimming, while Sara watches the unrest unfold on YouTube.
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After a bomb lands inside the pool where Yusra is swimming a meet, the girls decide to seek asylum in Germany with their cousin Nizar (a wonderful but underused Ahmed Malek), hoping to bring their parents and little sister with them afterward. Although this set piece features some breathtaking visuals, the shock is overly orchestrated to elicit emotions from the audience. There is no trust that the situation itself will make them feel the impact, both literally and figuratively.
The sisters’ journey is one relentless nail-biter trauma after another. Hosaini films the CGI-enhanced Aegean sea as vast and endless, highlighting how perilous the journey must have felt for those involved. The sequence where Sara and Yusra pull the boat as they swim beside, however, is filmed with choppy editing and murky cinematography. While the aim is surely to make the audience feel what the sisters felt, the result is action that is hard to follow, with Steven Price hitting you over the head with his overly dramatic score.
After the boat lands ashore in Greece, the group heads on foot toward their futures, walking past thousands of lifejackets representing the nearly 100,000 refugees who made the same journey. It’s a striking image but also an apt metaphor for the movie itself, which uses Yusra and Sara’s story to seemingly try to tell every single refugee’s story at the same time.
When introducing the group who made the crossing with the girls, each mentions their country — Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, etc. — but again, the film never takes the time to really introduce us to these characters. Yusra becomes close with a mother named Shada (Nahel Tzegai), fleeing with her infant daughter. It’s implied she’s leaving an abusive marriage, but her backstory is only mentioned fleetingly. Instead, she essentially becomes a Black best friend trope, urging Yusra to keep reaching for her Olympic dream.
Once in Germany, the film shifts gears to a run-of-the-mill underdog sports movie featuring Matthias Schweighöfer (“Army of the Dead”), whose character is so underwritten he’s lucky he seems to smile nothing but sunshine, as the swim coach Yusra convinces to continue her training. The requisite training montages are handsomely filmed, yet hopelessly generic. Seemingly out of steam, this half of the film is rushed. The bureaucracy that keeps the girls separated from their families longer than they had intended gets a perfunctory scene. Yusra goes to the Olympics, inspirational words are spoken, and everyone cheers.
Aside from the poor characterization of the characters, the forces behind the Syrian Civil War also remain vaguely on the outskirts throughout the entire movie. As do most of the foreign reactions and interventions, save some footage of Germany’s Angela Merkel and that of a bloodied, nameless child injured in an attack linked to Russia. The involvement in airstrikes led by the United States and the U.K. are curiously left unmentioned.
What makes other recent refugee films like “Flee” and “Limbo” so compelling lies in the way these films anchor their drama on the individuality and interiority of their characters. They draw you in with these rich characterizations, allowing these specifics to speak to a universal feeling shared by those who have gone through similar tribulations. While it is admirable that “The Swimmers” spends its two-and-a-half hour run time meticulously recreating the external journey of the sisters, by trying so hard to make them a cipher for every refugee, it sacrifices their individuality.
Destined to make audiences weep, “The Swimmers” is no doubt a crowd-pleaser with an important message about the growing refugee crisis worldwide, and Yusra’s story is one worth telling. It’s a pity the filmmakers couldn’t take the time to see her life as more than just a vessel for this message. [C]
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