Maiden (10/10)
by Tony Medley
Runtime 93 minutes.
PG.
If this isn’t the best movie of
the year, it’s close. It’s a documentary that tells the story of Tracy
Edwards’ putting together a crew consisting entirely of women to compete
in the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Race. It’s told entirely without
narration. Edwards and her crew and some of the skippers of her
competing ships tell the story themselves.
What makes this truly remarkable
is Tracy’s amazing foresight. Not only did she have to find a boat (a
58-footer named “Maiden”), she had to finance the entire thing. Here was
a young woman, totally without experience of doing such an endeavor,
plunging in and doing it all on the strength of her character. She had
to put the crew together (there aren’t a lot of experienced female
sailors), buy a boat, refurbish it, raise the financing, and be the
boss, all herculean tasks, especially for one who had no experience for
even one of those tasks.
As to her foresight, mentioned
above, she had a camera on board throughout the trip so this film is a
complete and accurate record of what they did, and how they did it. She
had two cameras, a fixed camera mounted on the back of the boat, and a
handheld camera. She said, “whenever it was ‘all hands on deck’ the last
person up would hit that button and that’s where we got the images of
surfing giant waves and that sort of thing.” So what we see is no
recreation, no CGI; it’s the real thing.
The race consists of six legs
which, for the Maiden, took 167 sailing days:
Southampton, England to Punta
del Este, Uruguay, 5,938 miles;
Punta del Este to Fremantle,
Australia 7,260 miles;
Fremantle to Auckland, NZ 3,272
miles
Auckland to Punta del Este, 6,255
miles
Punta del Este to Ft.
Lauderdale, FL 5,475 miles
Ft. Lauderdale to Southampton,
3,818 miles
While the trip takes something
like 10 months, and all legs are harrowing, by far the most dangerous is
the one from Punta del Este to Fremantle, which takes them across the
Southern Ocean and its frigid temperatures (-20˚F), high winds, and high
seas. Tracy’s cameras capture it all.
The Whitbread is held every
three years and totals 32,000 nautical miles. In 1989 it comprised
several classes of different boat sizes. Now called the Volvo Ocean
Race, it is no longer open to smaller boats like Tracy’s.
The fact that this movie was
ever made is truly serendipitous. Director Alex Holmes had a child in a
school in southwest London where Tracy lives. The school had a
celebration and at the last moment the scheduled speaker canceled. They
called Tracy at the last minute, and Holmes was in attendance. He was
blown away by her story and called her the next day and said, “Hi, my
name’s Alex Holmes, I’m a film producer, I love your story and my
daughter just wouldn’t shut up about it on the walk home.” The result is
this captivating documentary. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
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