The Brooklin Boat Yard stands in a quiet harbour on the coast of Maine and makes high-spec yachts for rich men and women to sail. Its latest client is Graham Green, a millionaire financier who has commissioned the team to build him a 56ft cruising sailboat, the Kiandra, complete with maple worktops and a Sonos sound system. Green plans to sail the boat around the world, while its creators will stay in Brooklin, raise their kids and make boats. These men know their place. “We’re just the fucking help,” one confides.
Boatbuilders is directed with the lightest of touches by 33-year-old Luke Lorentzen, who has already proved himself a past master in unhurried, observational documentaries about work. Midnight Family, his 2019 debut, spotlighted the travails of a private ambulance business in Mexico City, while 2023’s A Still Small Voice trailed a chaplain at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. Neither, though, immersed themselves in their subject to quite the level of Boatbuilders, which covers the process from lumber cutting to launch and from one summer through to the following spring. The leaves turn to gold, then the snow starts to fly, but down at the boatyard the job continues on schedule. The craftsmen plane and glue and discuss their lives.
Folded in amid the heat and hubbub of this year’s Venice film festival, Lorentzen’s serene piece of slow cinema provides both a cool palate cleanser and a paean to the pleasures of practical work. If you’ve ever watched Witness and wished that the barn-raising sequence was longer, then do seek this out: your cup will runneth over.
Is Lorentzen’s main focus the boat or the team of New Englanders who make it? Almost certainly both, in that the two are indivisible, with each dependent on the other. And while the boatyard’s soft-spoken boss, Brian Larkin, never actually goes so far as to say that ‘there is no I in team’, it’s the coded message of every one of his pep talks as he seeks to gently elevate a Jesus-bearded carpenter, Trent Glisson, to the role of project manager. Trent – an amiable young father, still dithering over baby names – is the closest Lorentzen’s film has to a hero. He fears that he’s floundering, worries the boat has gone over budget and knows that he needs to be more decisive. When the millionaire client video-calls for a progress report, Trent’s responses are so awkward that the conversation soon stalls. Flummoxed, Green elects to put a brave face on it. “You guys are like the ducks on the pond,” he says. “You look super-mellow on top, but you’re paddling like crazy.”
Is it wrong to wish for more conflict and strife? Lorentzen’s approach is discreetly respectful, occasionally to a fault. When, midway through the film, an obstinate craftsman has to be fired, we learn of it via the team meeting that follows and the offending employee is never referred to by name. “It’s a small community,” says Larkin by way of explanation. The boss spares his blushes and the director plays ball.
Is this a political film? Certainly not in an obvious sense. These men are happy in their work and desire little more than the opportunity to keep doing it. They punch the clock and sweep the shavings and fit the planks around the frame. They measure their year by the turn of the seasons, gathering apples in autumn, ice-fishing in winter, while the older builders help their younger colleagues gain strength. Nonetheless, there is an undertow of Marxist melancholia to what should be the film’s euphoric final scenes, when Green rocks up in his Ray-Bans to take possession of the Kiandra. Green’s a nice guy and will no doubt treat her well. But he laughs too much and is way out of his depth; a master among servants who know infinitely more than he does.
As for Trent, our plucky project manager, the launch marks the end of a momentous 12 months. He’s earned his spurs and provided for his family; welcomed one baby and said goodbye to another. Job done, clock punched, he climbs into his tiny skiff, fires up the outboard motor and putters home across the bay.
