Men Who Swim (2010)

Background: Writing about documentaries poses a unique problem to someone like me. I've always wanted The Depths to be as much about the stories behind the movie as much as the movies themselves. Unfortunately, small scale foreign documentaries are not very well documented, and the makers of small scale foreign documentaries are even more obscure. Apart from an incredibly brief bio from PBS' Independent Lens there is very little readily available information on director Dylan Williams (Having a fairly common name probably doesn't help matters. I know that pain well.) He's produced things for The History Channel and The BBC, but IMDb lists Men Who Swim as his only credit. Even information on the all-male Swedish synchronized swimming team, around which this movie is centered, is limited mostly to blurbs about when this movie was shown on PBS (even the stream is just a rip from the Independent Lens). So I guess the best you and I can hope for is to just dive into the deep end and watch together... get it?

Plot: This movie starts simply enough. It's about a man, the man directing the documentary, who moves to Sweden for love. He's been living there for about 5 years, but still doesn't feel like he's a part of Sweden. He loves swimming and decides to join a club. The club in question is the Swedish Swim Arts Gents, an all male synchronized swimming club. The club is made up of guys that are pushing 40 that have a diverse background. The leader of the club is a meat buyer, but he's not really content with that. Other members include two old rockers who have been longtime friends, a man who decides he's been working too much since getting a promotion and other mundane people like that.

They hire a coach who whips them into a little bit of shape, she even wrote a book on synchronized swimming. Though she teaches the guys some basic moves (When she gets to them, they can't even float properly), it's clear early on that they won't be able to grow too far, she's become too close to them. Word about the team gets around quick and they book some gigs out of the sheer novelty of an all-male synchronized swimming team. They actually book a surprisingly large crowd, though most of them, as they predicted early, walk out in droves before the performance is over.

Along the way, we get to learn Dylan Williams and all that he's going though. He still doesn't really feel like he fits in. To make matters worse, he loses his job, right when the woman he moved to Sweden to be with decides to go back to her studies. It's a shame too because he's gonna have a lot to pay for. Turns out they're not the only men's synchronized swimming team in the world, in fact there's a world championship and they're going to go to it.

The guys get pretty good

Training gets intense and tempers flare around the team. It's only 3 months before the championship and they can't even decide what they should practice. So they ditch their old coach (with her consent, they remain friends, don't worry) and hire a former pro. She whips them into shape and makes them train for real. It's suprising how quickly they come together once they get a little direction. Dylan even manages to land a job teaching film to kids that seem like they couldn't care less about film.

As for the competition itself, well, you'll just have to watch the movie.

Why Was It Forgotten? Subject matter. This is certainly not the first documentary with a very niche subject matter. Indie hit The King Of Kong comes to mind. That was about the world of competitive arcade gaming. This movie has many of the same trappings as that one. It has a familiar story line, told in an incredibly unfamiliar setting. It's safe to say, though, that synchronized swimming has an even smaller fanbase than classic gaming though.

What Went Right? Everything. This is a truly great movie. It's a sports comedy that just so happens to be completely real. A scene where they show other national teams warming up before the big cometition seems like it should be straight out of a movie like Dodgeball or previous Depths entry Blackball, but it actually exists. It has characters you want to root for, it has a story arc you want to follow, it has the reigning champions you want to hate (Seriously, fuck those Dutch bastards). If this were a scripted comedy, it would all seem very unbelievable, which is part of the charm of this movie.

There's also the side plot of Dylan growing as a character. He, like much of the team, is pushing 40. He had lost his job at the beginning of the movie and the movie gets some genuinely emotional beats out of his money woes. But that all plays a backseat to the way this motley crew comes together to be the most charming all male synchronized swimming crew ever to come out of Sweden.

Verdict: I've never cared more about synchronized swimming

Score: 100%