This roar of praise for "Swimming Upstream" begins at Harvard, where the film ends. That's an obnoxious way to open, I know, but it's where I met Tony Fingleton, who is both the author and the subject of this film. And I start at Harvard not just because it's the responsible, "transparent," full-disclosure thing to do --- on the Internet, you really don't want to forget to mention a friendship of 40 years --- but because the punchline is on me.
I only met one Tony Fingleton at Harvard.
Like so much that happened there, I got it all wrong.
But that's understandable.
Talk about "Swimming Upstream" --- Harvard was such a reach for my family that when I told my Upper West Side grandmother I'd been admitted to the class of 1968, she sneered. "Harberg?" she said. "Harberg --- vot's a matter, you couldn't get into Columbia?"
So it goes without saying that having graduated from Milton Academy --- where an astonishing 27 of my 45 not-overly-brilliant classmates were accepted at Harvard; man, that was a different world! --- I promptly set out to be accepted by every Harvard organization that ought to have turned me down. A final club (Harvard's very upscale version of a fraternity)? Oh yeah. The Hasty Pudding? That too. And on and on....
At The Hasty Pudding, a mega-club with a great dining room, potent whiskey sours and an annual student-created drag musical, I met Tony Fingleton. You'd think, with my drive and hypersensitivity to Class issues, I'd recognize another fish out of water. But no --- Tony looked like the Real Thing to me. He was big and brawny and tweedy, gregarious and good-humored and not the least bit snooty. And that impressed me, because he was, I had heard, some sort of a swimming god in his native Australia. His best friend at Harvard was the son of the head of the Australian Army, or some such title. And in addition to the Pudding, he was a member of the Porcellian, a final club so exalted that it had rejected Franklin Roosevelt.
Tony Fingleton and I have moved in the same circles for four decades. I hired one of his daughters as my assistant. Along the way, I learned who he is --- I just forgot to find out who he was.
But then Tony and his sister wrote a book about growing up in Brisbane in the 1950s, and the book became a movie starring Geoffrey Rush (as Harold Fingleton, Tony's father) and Judy Davis (as Dora Fingleton, Tony's mother) and a teenage hunk as young Tony, and the movie has at last made it to the United States, in just a handful of cities, and now it falls to me, as one of the few Americans who has seen it, to urge you to travel some distance, if necessary, to see this remarkable story --- how Tony Fingleton, the son of an abusive, alcoholic father, literally swam his way to a full scholarship at Harvard.
Yes, a scholarship, because Harold Fingleton was a dockworker, often unemployed, and at no time interested in the future of the second of his five children. His first thought was for Harold, Jr., and when Harold Jr. faltered as an athlete, he turned his attention to John, his third son. What about Tony, the second son? He played piano. He was his mother's boy. He was weak, soft, "a poofter."
But in the pool, Tony had learned that "water kept you alive." In the pool, he felt safe. And so, with no one watching, he mastered the backstroke. Harold learns about Tony's prowess by accident. He starts training him because he's decided to train John --- and Tony, desperate for his father's approval, responds.
You can't live in water. And home is hell. Harold is volatile; you can't predict his moods. And Dora can't charm him out of every rage. Darkness is a never-ending cloud, a leaden heaviness, in this household --- and you feel its weight on your heart. In part, that's testimony to the spare, unvarnished screenplay. But even more, it's in the interplay between Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis. Their careers are a litany of great performances; "Swimming Upstream" goes to the top of their list of lifetime achievements.
And that is why "Swimming Upstream" isn't really a "sports movie." It's way too complex. In "Rocky," we root for Stallone because he's a good-hearted lug who's got one shot in life; there are no second acts for him. But Tony Fingleton became a great swimmer to get back at his father, to beat his father, to have one thing in his life that was his own --- and in winning the Australian championship and that thick envelope from Harvard, he swam away from his oppressor forever. Or did he? Without his father, none of this would have happened.
Oh, yes, blood is so much thicker than water.
I think I understand why Tony Fingleton never talked about his difficult childhood. It wasn't, I suspect, because he was ashamed of where he came from, because if any man adored his mother, it's this guy. It was, rather, because this knotted tale couldn't be told in twenty-five words or less. And because, having freed himself, he saw no point in looking back.
But the years pass. Vision gives shape to memory. And memory, tempered by compassion, is the raw material of art. "Swimming Upstream" is art. You want to see this movie like you want to take your next breath.
-- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com
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