True Spirit

At sixteen Jessica Watson set out to sail around the world alone, non-stop and unassisted, in a thirty-three foot boat. The voyage took 210 days and included seven knockdowns, the boat rolling flat and righting itself. Sarah Spillane's film adapts Watson's own 2010 memoir, with Teagan Croft in the lead, Anna Paquin as her mother Julie and Cliff Curtis as Ben Bryant, the sailor who trained her. The hard problem here is holding two hours inside a single-handed cockpit, and the answer is radio calls and cutaways to the family onshore, which relieves the pressure more often than it should. Who it is for: viewers who like true adventure stories with a young protagonist. Who it is not for: anyone hoping the film will interrogate its heroine, because it stays firmly in admiration.