‘The Row’ Review: Bryan Fogel’s Breathless New Doc

The Row, the new documentary from Bryan Fogel, does for open-sea rowing what the Oscar-winning Free Solo did for unassisted rock climbing, offering an intense yet meditative glimpse into the extremes people push themselves to in hopes of a catharsis that might have instead been achieved from a rigorous course of therapy.

Put a different way, watching The Row is an 87-minute cycle of responses that alternate between “Whoa, gnarly!” and “What reasonable person would ever do something like this?” rendered viscerally enough that it’s easy to get caught up in its questions about trauma, masculinity and family without dwelling on how often those questions either don’t get asked directly enough or have no satisfying answers.

It’s a gripping and moving documentary, but despite its attempted philosophical and nautical depth, it doesn’t benefit from post-screening contemplation. Unlike its protagonist, who’s constantly bursting through the limitations of human endurance — Fogel’s thematically complementary Icarus won the doc Oscar the year before Free Solo — the film has barriers it can’t quite seem to push past, despite some artistic adventurousness.

Fogel’s subject here is Tez Steinberg, a veteran of 47 marathons, two Iron Mans and one 145-mile ultra-marathon, who responded to his father’s death by deciding to row solo from California to Hawaii, a distance of 2,500 miles, in a 23-foot rowboat.

“Rowboat” gives off Old Man and the Sea vibes. This was a more advanced fiberglass craft, albeit one that Steinberg appears to have made by hand. Accompanied by some technology — radars, satellite phones and whatnot — and a volleyball replica of Wilson from Castaway, Tez spent weeks in the Pacific with pods of dolphins, friendly seagulls and his own thoughts.

Then, for reasons best discovered as the documentary unfolds, Tez decided to do it again, only with a far greater distance and more traumatic motivating factors.

Large chunks of The Row are culled from the exhaustive filming that Tez did on his journey — footage that’s from a stabilized onboard position and yet still captures the tumultuous experience of being battered by waves, tossed in rainstorms and discomfited by the eerie tranquility of a glassy Pacific.

If Free Solo needed to hit theaters with a warning for audiences prone to a fear of heights, it might be wise to market The Row with giant popcorn boxes filled with dramamine. The bigger the screen, the more likely one is to feel full immersion in an experience that Tez admits was frequently unpleasant, only without the accompanying hits of dopamine or adrenaline, much less the sense of accomplishment. Then again, viewers only have to hear about the advancing sores on Tez’s rear end and see the blisters on his hands from a comfortable remove.

The documentary’s editors — Justin Krook, Collin Kriner and RJ Buckley — have a good sense of what moments to showcase and how long to dwell on them, ensuring that for audiences of a hale constitution, breathless excitement outweighs nausea. Mostly. When Tez’s narration fails to fully visualize an incident or an idea, the documentary relies on animation from Office of Development and Design, imagery that alternates between borderline photo-realistic and hallucinatory, depending on the need.

While The Row is most captivating when Tez is afloat, flirting with swings between escalating madness and introspection regarding his family, inherited trauma and different coping mechanisms, Fogel respects that most viewers would be unable to tolerate the claustrophobia, with or without animation. Fogel became involved with Tez’s story between his first and second voyage, and he’s there for the preparation and training, a process he admits repeatedly was insufficient even if I felt exhausted just watching.

Tez shares his insecurities and mythology with Fogel in talking head sequences from land, but at no point does the director ever shake his subject out of the tunnel vision necessary to advance his project. The result is that for all the vulnerability baked into this adventure, Fogel comes across as robotic and zealous, more similar to tech bro and anti-aging zealot Bryan Johnson — subject of Netflix’s Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever — than a relatable person. Given that his basic situation — grief, uncertainty about his future, clear and undiagnosed depression — is easy to emphasize with, the remove becomes frustrating when we aren’t rocking back and forth on the vessel with Tez.

Apparently this is who the Steinbergs are, thanks to their parents. Tez’s brother, sister and aunt are key interview subjects, and their approach to this thing that he’s doing is unnervingly matter-of-fact. That his family doesn’t aggressively question him and the director doesn’t aggressively question him presumably is what allowed Tez to do this wild thing in the first place, and helps the documentary simulate objectivity. But simulated objectivity in a situation this outlandish is an aesthetic choice, a contrivance of its own.

There’s a role that Sanni McCandless, Alex Honnold’s then-girlfriend, played in Free Solo — namely the person who loves and respects the protagonist’s bubble but isn’t actually in the bubble — that has no equivalent in The Row and that absence is felt throughout. Or perhaps the lack of that equivalent in Tez’s life is actually what The Row is about, without saying it? If you don’t know what “reasonable” looks like, nothing is unreasonable.

If Tez couldn’t dig deeper on his own, couldn’t conceive of alternative life strategies, perhaps it wasn’t Fogel’s job to interrogate, even if interrogation might have made it easier for an outsider to understand. Instead, The Row asks us to get caught up in an incomprehensible thing, and at that, at least, it’s successful.