Young Woman and the Sea review – Disney’s surface-level

Daisy Ridley leads the reductive, if at times stirring, story of the first woman to swim across the English channel

Born to German immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York, Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle crawl-stroked her way through the American dream. In spite of great adversity – a girlhood bout of measles that left her partially deaf, protestations from her butcher father, the ingrained sexism of a country freshly considering that women may deserve the right to vote – she pursued swimming supremacy with a single-minded determination, a drive that brought her all the way across the English Channel. As the first woman to make the treacherous 21-mile journey through choppy, jellyfish-infested waters, she proved that gender has nothing to do with athletic ability, and personified the current of progress rippling out from the suffragette movement into the rest of society.

The new biopic Young Woman and the Sea presents Eberle’s life as a broadly inspiring parable of female striving and triumph, its plot points readily mapped onto any struggle to break into a boys’ club. Delayed for five years at Paramount, recast, sold off to Disney, shunted to their streaming channel and reassigned to theaters after encouraging test screenings, the most surprising aspect of this neat-and-tidy success story is how long it took to get made.