{"id":607222,"date":"2026-09-06T01:10:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/607222\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T01:10:07","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:10:07","slug":"the-row-review-bryan-fogels-breathless-new-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/607222\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Row’ Review: Bryan Fogel’s Breathless New Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Row<\/a>, the new documentary from Bryan Fogel<\/a>, does for open-sea rowing what the Oscar-winning Free Solo<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tPut a different way, watching The Row is an 87-minute cycle of responses that alternate between \u201cWhoa, gnarly!\u201d and \u201cWhat reasonable person would ever do something like this?\u201d rendered viscerally enough that it\u2019s easy to get caught up in its questions about trauma, masculinity and family without dwelling on how often those questions either don\u2019t get asked directly enough or have no satisfying answers.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThe Row\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tBreathlessly effective, even if it doesn’t always dig deep.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Telluride Film Festival
Director: Bryan Fogel
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 27 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a gripping and moving documentary, but despite its attempted philosophical and nautical depth, it doesn\u2019t benefit from post-screening contemplation. Unlike its protagonist, who\u2019s constantly bursting through the limitations of human endurance \u2014 Fogel\u2019s thematically complementary Icarus<\/a> won the doc Oscar the year before Free Solo \u2014 the film has barriers it can\u2019t quite seem to push past, despite some artistic adventurousness.<\/p>\n

\n\tFogel\u2019s subject here is Tez Steinberg<\/a>, a veteran of 47 marathons, two Iron Mans and one 145-mile ultra-marathon, who responded to his father\u2019s death by deciding to row solo from California to Hawaii, a distance of 2,500 miles, in a 23-foot rowboat.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRowboat\u201d 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 \u2014 radars, satellite phones and whatnot \u2014 and a volleyball replica of Wilson from Castaway, Tez spent weeks in the Pacific with pods of dolphins, friendly seagulls and his own thoughts.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tLarge chunks of The Row are culled from the exhaustive filming that Tez did on his journey \u2014 footage that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf 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\u2019s rear end and see the blisters on his hands from a comfortable remove.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary\u2019s editors \u2014 Justin Krook, Collin Kriner and RJ Buckley \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile 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\u2019s story between his first and second voyage, and he\u2019s there for the preparation and training, a process he admits repeatedly was insufficient even if I felt exhausted just watching.<\/p>\n

\n\tTez 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 \u2014 subject of Netflix\u2019s Don\u2019t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever \u2014 than a relatable person. Given that his basic situation \u2014 grief, uncertainty about his future, clear and undiagnosed depression \u2014 is easy to emphasize with, the remove becomes frustrating when we aren\u2019t rocking back and forth on the vessel with Tez.<\/p>\n

\n\tApparently this is who the Steinbergs are, thanks to their parents. Tez\u2019s brother, sister and aunt are key interview subjects, and their approach to this thing that he\u2019s doing is unnervingly matter-of-fact. That his family doesn\u2019t aggressively question him and the director doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a role that Sanni McCandless, Alex Honnold\u2019s then-girlfriend, played in Free Solo \u2014 namely the person who loves and respects the protagonist\u2019s bubble but isn\u2019t actually in the bubble \u2014 that has no equivalent in The Row and that absence is felt throughout. Or perhaps the lack of that equivalent in Tez\u2019s life is actually what The Row is about, without saying it? If you don\u2019t know what \u201creasonable\u201d looks like, nothing is unreasonable.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf Tez couldn\u2019t dig deeper on his own, couldn\u2019t conceive of alternative life strategies, perhaps it wasn\u2019t Fogel\u2019s 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\u2019s successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Row, the new documentary from Bryan Fogel, does for open-sea rowing what the Oscar-winning Free Solo did…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":607223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[274775,146,274776,85,46,397,274588,274312,274777,134405],"class_list":["post-607222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-bryan-fogel","tag-entertainment","tag-icarus","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-telluride-2026","tag-telluride-film-festival","tag-tez-steinberg","tag-the-row"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=607222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/607223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=607222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=607222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=607222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}