One golden rule of a biopic is that it should probably give you more of an understanding of its subject than you had beforehand, but Vindication Swim is less cinematic than its subject’s Wikipedia page. Writer-director Elliot Hasler evokes the late 1920s decently well, but the film is otherwise a leaden affair, poised, from the start, to sink to the bottom of the ocean, with awkward acting choices and limp direction. There is, frankly, not much here to salvage from the wreckage. Even the sound design and cinematography are off, with dialogue drowning in echo and footage that is blown out and poorly color corrected.
Hasler is 25 years old, and in his press materials frequently stresses just how impressive his age is; his first feature film was completed when he was just 16. That is impressive on its face, but being young does not automatically mean strong artistry. It is never not obvious that an inexperienced filmmaker has made Vindication Swim, packed as it is with poor craftsmanship and a shoddy story.
Heaving Than Water, Slower Than Ice: Vindication Swim Fails to Swim
The real-life Mercedes Gleitze (Kirsten Callaghan) deserved a better interpretation of her life’s achievements. It isn’t as if the first British woman to swim the English Channel doesn’t have a compelling story to tell. Born to German parents in Brighton, England, Gleitze was already a respected swimmer by the time she finally succeeded in crossing the Channel on her eighth attempt, on October 7th, 1927. Four years earlier, Gleitze had set the record for longest time swimming, which she did in the Thames, at ten hours and forty-five minutes. Gleitze’s life post-Channel swim was doubly interesting: she became the first person to ever swim the Strait of Gibraltar, raised funds to build homes for the houseless, and, mysteriously, vanished from public life in her later years. She died denying all that she had done.
Vindication Swim is about none of those things, though it is hard to say what the film is about at all. The film vaguely points to Gleitze’s repeated trouble with the oppressive patriarchy of the time, but it can only manage to do so in the tamest of terms. The first act is inadvertently comic in its attempts to do so as we watch Gleitze have to work as a stenographer, the greatest harm of it being that it is boring. Yes, a boss does make an inappropriate pᴀss at her, but she easily brushes this off.
Very little time is given to explore Gleitze’s motivations or even her pᴀssions. In a bizarre recurrence, Gleitze is visited by the ghost of her father, who always appears behind her in the bathroom like a perverted creep, but these scenes are clearly meant to give us some kind of insight into her dogged determination. Otherwise, Hasler has given Callaghan the impossible job of saying things like, “the water beckons me” with any kind of grounded seriousness. Callaghan can’t do this or much of anything all that convincingly, though its hard to put her at fault for such poorly written words.
One of the somewhat intriguing threads is that Gleitze’s very name may have prevented her from being sponsored by the Amateur Swimming ᴀssociation, who believed the English public would not respond well to a Germanic surname. But the thread is barely tugged on, in favor of hammering home repeated mention of Gleitze’s Sєx. Hasler’s film is dependent on naming the thing rather than showing it. There is talk of misogyny but very little action of it. Gleitze’s eventual coach, Harold Best (John Locke), initially says he does not train “girls,” but then shows up two scenes later ready to reverse that stance. Gleitze’s coworkers gossip about her not being a “real woman.” Yes, we understand, it’s a hard time to be a woman with ambition.
Except there is no clear indication of what her ambition is except to swim, nor even why she likes to do so. Callaghan reportedly trained for three years, but none of that preparation is evident onscreen because Hasler has no facility for the water scenes. Meanwhile, on land, everyone acts like they’ve just taken a sedative, so bizarre and slow are the line deliveries.
Most of the film is dependent on emphasizing just how oppressive patriarchal society was at this time, but it doesn’t really find success in this way at all. It then harps on the minor side story of Elizabeth Gade (Victoria Summer) fabricating her own swim. The last 45 minutes of the film suddenly become an Oppenheimer-like courtroom drama eviscerating Gleitze, who is caught in the crosshairs of Gade’s hoax. Not to take anything away from her accomplishments, but the self-seriousness of the court scenes is self-evidently absurd. Nonetheless, the hoax in question leads to the vindication swim of the film’s тιтle, which only happens in the last 20 minutes.
Hasler seems to want us to connect Gleitze’s endurance as a swimmer to her endurance as a woman in such a backwards world, but he has neither the technical ability nor the writerly prowess to make that intention indelible. What results is an utter slog from start to finish. If the real-life Gleitze wanted to forget her life as a swimmer, perhaps it’s best we forget this movie exists, too.
