THE STORY – Haunted by personal tragedy, Tez Steinberg embarks on a solo 9,000-mile crossing of the Pacific Ocean, battling towering swells, isolation, and the psychological toll of months alone at sea.
THE CAST – Tez Steinberg
THE TEAM – Bryan Fogel (Director/Writer) & Mark Monroe (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 89 Minutes
In 2017, director Bryan Fogel used a documentary about steroid use among professional athletes as the starting point for a much larger and more interesting investigation into corruption and international politics in his Academy Award-winning “Icarus.” With “The Row,” Fogel is once again focused on an extreme athletic achievement, this time the story of Tez Steinberg, who rowed 2,700 miles alone from California to Hawaii and later another 5,000 miles from Hawaii to Australia. This time, however, Fogel seems uninterested in exploring much beyond Steinberg’s athletic accomplishment, choosing to focus on Steinberg, and only Steinberg, and taking the most uncritical look at him imaginable, which makes for a frustratingly shallow examination of an extraordinary athletic feat.
As we learn from the film, Tez Steinberg grew up in a dysfunctional household and discovered extreme endurance sports like ultramarathons as a means of escaping his emotional pain. After Steinberg loses his father, he turns toward his most ambitious challenge yet: rowing from California to Hawaii alone in a 20-something-foot rowboat, despite having no prior rowing experience. After completing that voyage, Steinberg also loses his mother and sets out on another, even more ambitious journey: rowing 5,000 miles from Hawaii to Australia. The film primarily consists of GoPro footage from Steinberg’s two voyages, as we see him repair broken equipment, deal with infections and rashes, battle waves and exhaustion, and periodically explain to the camera how the voyage is helping him work through his grief.
Steinberg’s story is compelling on paper. The idea of a man who responds to loss by dropping out of society and rowing enormous distances alone, despite having no prior rowing experience, has shades of Hemingway. The problem is that “The Row,” which runs just 89 minutes, is so impressed by Steinberg’s achievement that it shows remarkably little interest in examining what makes him tick beyond the explanations Steinberg himself supplies.
Fogel provides us little information about Steinberg, other than his desire to push himself physically and his childhood trauma. In doing so, “The Row” robs us of half of the story. Researching Steinberg after the film reveals that prior to embarking on his rowing journeys, Steinberg was a Deloitte consultant who devised his idea for his cross-ocean solo row while earning his MBA. Steinberg introduces himself at the start of the film as the founder of something called the “United World Challenge.” The film never delves into what United World Challenge is, why Steinberg created it, or how it relates to his rowing endeavors, but United World Challenge is a non-profit project that Steinberg created that is central to his rowing endeavors. Thanks to this nonprofit, which is focused particularly on ocean conservation, Steinberg rowed across the Pacific backed by a sizable network of corporate sponsors, nonprofit partners and support personnel. None of these details make Steinberg’s physical accomplishment any less extraordinary. But “The Row” has chosen to focus almost exclusively on Steinberg and why he undertook these two voyages, yet all the film really offers for the “why” is that Steinberg needed another endurance activity to help process grief. If that is the case, why the ocean? Why did he create an ocean-related nonprofit?
Steinberg himself says he had no prior rowing experience before beginning the process that eventually led to Hawaii. That raises an obvious question: why does a long-distance runner suddenly decide to row alone across an ocean? Both rows were used as fundraising efforts, with the second row specifically focused on raising tens of thousands of dollars for ocean conservation efforts. In outside interviews, Steinberg even says that the focus of embarking on his second row was “first and foremost on ocean conservation.” If Steinberg has a passion for preserving the ocean’s beauty, that isn’t something that the film explores, yet it was a major motivating factor in Steinberg’s efforts. Additionally, in external interviews, Steinberg publicly described his planned rowing expeditions in explicitly competitive terms. In 2017, he told London Business School that his planned ocean crossing was intended to set an American record for the fastest solo crossing; years later, he promoted the Hawaii-to-Australia row as an effort to set the Guinness World Record. Again, if Steinberg has a competitive side that drives him, that’s a side of his character that is important, but that the film never permits us to see.
Even accepting the film’s framing of Steinberg’s rows having simply been Steinberg’s methods for processing grief, the film still fails to engage with one of the most interesting questions raised by that version of Steinberg’s story. Both of Steinberg’s parents died by suicide. Steinberg’s response to emotional pain is to repeatedly seek out activities that place his own life at considerable risk. By the time Steinberg has embarked upon his second row, he has already suffered a heart attack, and chooses to proceed anyway. The combination of Steinberg’s family history and his willingness to accept extreme danger raises the question of whether his attraction to risk is more psychologically complicated than the film is willing to acknowledge. “The Row” seems content to accept Steinberg’s explanation that he undertook these activities to process grief and, having completed them, has healed. Given everything the film shows us, his assurances are not entirely convincing.
One can’t help but compare “The Row” to other films about men embarking on extreme athletic achievements, where the filmmakers were more interested in digging into their central character’s motivations. “Free Solo,” for example, understood that it was not merely the act of Alex Honnold completing his climb that made the film interesting, but also understanding what Honnold was sacrificing to complete it, and how his activities affected his relationships with the people around him.
Here, we learn little about what Steinberg’s decisions to disappear for months at a time have cost him. We don’t know if he had romantic partners, and if so, how they tolerated his decision to embark upon these rows. Steinberg seems to have set aside a white collar consulting career to focus on his rowing efforts and non-profit. That decision is something the film never addresses, nor what the ramifications were for Steinberg’s life. Steinberg also had a large support team behind his rows. Steinberg, by his own admission, had no prior experience with rowing, yet embarks upon his first adventure with a souped-up, custom-built rowboat. Presumably some of his collaborators have some relationship of their own to rowing. But we learn nothing about them or Steinberg’s relationship to them.
Because Fogel accepts Steinberg’s explanations of his motivations without digging much further, the main thing the film can offer is the spectacle of the rowing itself. On that level, “The Row” is an impressive cinematic achievement. Fogel and editors Justin Krook, Collin Kriner, and RJ Buckley pared down thousands of hours of footage into fast-paced sequences and create real suspense by showcasing obstacles in Steinberg’s way, like broken equipment requiring him to devise MacGyver-like solutions using whatever materials are available aboard the boat. There is also an undeniable power to seeing Steinberg’s body deteriorate, as his skin grows leathery and sun-damaged, his hands swell and crack, and his lips become infected. But that spectacle cannot compensate for the film’s overall lack of curiosity about its subject, particularly when there is clearly a more interesting and complex story about who Steinberg is and why he embarked upon these journeys, that Fogel has not bothered to explore.
