by Jason Adams
You will most assuredly think of the crackling and dangerous worlds of Darren Aronofsky while watching The Novice, Lauren Hadaway's splintering character study by way of electrifying sports drama which finally gives Isabelle Fuhrman (so captivating in 2009's trash-thriller Orphan), a leading role to sink her now adult teeth into. The film, which just premiered at Tribeca and won several awards (including a deserved Best Actress for Fuhrman), is Black Swan sluicing the water, The Wrestler via regatta, Pi by port. It's a mad rashy rush to the finish line, red knuckled and raw with tension, and Fuhrman delivers a bloody true star-turn.
She plays Alex Dall, a college freshman who joins the crew team almost on a lark, and becomes single-mindedly obsessed with making it to the top boat on the varsity team, no matter the cost to her body and mind...
Never even mind every human person around her -- her teammates, her girlfriend -- who seem dawdling by comparison. Her focus eases so singularly towards top banana status that she can barely make time to notice the skin peeling off her in several places, much less anything resembling proper human interaction.
It doesn't start off that way. Alex might seem maybe a little bit off when we first meet her -- Fuhrman is just a natural fit with "a little bit off" in the best of way -- but she's friendly enough. She smiles, she goes to parties and has some friends that she does that with. Of course when she checks "One Night Stand" off her "college experience to-do list" with ruthless efficiency it should've been our first warning sign that Alex is a little less about living in the moment than she is about living up to some fixed notion of experience. Life seems like an assignment to her, and once she's trained her eye on the prize everything prize-adjacent dissolves like mist off the morning skim.
Women's athletics haven't gotten nearly as many serious tackles cinematically as have Men's and that, from the start, makes The Novice riveting just on an experiential level -- for one it's a fresh thrill seeing how an entirely different physicality gets broken down and reshaped into a machine built for one purpose like this. But it's not just watching Fuhrman transform her body in front of us (and this is as much a physical performance as it is an emotional one) but it's the being dropped into this almost male-less world of women's crew that fascinates, just merely due to the cinematic rarity of it. The relationships and friendships between competitive college women that we watch be tested and forged here captivate because we haven't really gotten to see the intricacies of these intimacies before; not in this way.
Gorgeously lensed by DP Todd Martin to at times to resemble the fierceness of a slow-motion sneaker commercial, we're plunged head-first into the physicality of Alex's obsession -- sweat glistens with Gatorade intensity, the roar of an absent crowd silently shadowing in every corner of the frame. We truly feel it, the burn, the compulsion -- it's exhilarating and exhausting to watch, so transfixing in the minutiae of Alex's claustrophobic mania that it winded me just from holding my breath, stroke after stroke after endless self-abusive stroke.
Of course so much of that is due to Fuhrman, a riveting presence even in her lightest moments; she's truly an actor with entire galaxies twinkling within her dark eyes, and you watch her because you can't watch anything but her. The Novice proves an ace vehicle for those talents, a high spectacle of Fuhrman-ness, and hopefully a calling card to casting agents that she's one absolutely destined for gold-medal greatness herself. And I mean a good greatness, not Alex's terrifying immolation of such, although Fuhrman sure sells us on every inch of the lot within her.