Annette Bening plays the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad as a woman who doesn’t pity herself. Neither does the film.
“Nyad” is about an athlete creating her own lore. Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) is proud that her last name stems from the naiads of Greek mythology. “My ancestors! The nymphs that swam in the lakes and the rivers and the ocean,” Diana trumpets to everyone in earshot. A record-breaking long-distance swimmer, she’s got the lung capacity of a real blowhard. Her ever-patient best friend, Bonnie (Jodie Foster), spends this exuberant and enervating biopic cutting Diana off mid-crow. Braggadocio takes you far in politics or business; jocks, however, have to prove it in sweat. And so, at 60, Diana vows to conquer the challenge that bested her at age 28. She’ll swim nonstop from Cuba to Florida — over two days of sharks, storms, stinging jellyfish and hallucinatory exhaustion. For most of this riveting crowd-pleaser, she fails.
“I’m either a stubborn fool,” the real Diana Nyad wrote in “Find a Way,” her 2015 memoir, “or I’m a valiant warrior.” The film, in its first minutes, prefers the latter, opening with a rat-a-tat montage of her many successes: author, linguist, Phi Beta Kappa scholar. I groaned. Please, not an inspirational advertorial about women and aging and grit — the artificial saccharine Diana had to use to peddle her story to corporations who might sponsor her repeated attempts.
To my relief, the directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, working with the screenwriter Julia Cox, trace Diana’s mythic roots not just to the naiads, but to zealots like Captain Ahab. Vasarhelyi and Chin specialize in documentaries (“Free Solo, “Meru”) about extreme outdoorsmen whose feats require a misery threshold, and a self-centered monomania, that few can understand. Chin, a mountaineer himself, gets that mind-set — and Vasarhelyi, his longtime filmmaking partner and wife, also knows the strain these adventurers put on the loved ones providing emotional support. Cheerleading can tip over into feeling complicit in their potential death.
Bening, who has a convincing sidestroke, shows us a woman willing to endure Hell. I’ve never seen a performance with this little vanity in service of a character drowning in her own ego. “Everyone should have a superiority complex,” Diana says, but the line comes at a point in the film where her superiority looks a lot like martyrdom. We’ve already witnessed her skin blistered by sunburn, her eyes and lips swollen into monstrous bulges, her face and neck lashed with tentacle burns, and her body, coiled on the floor, vomiting — or worse, still in the surf, but so weak and semiconscious and sleep-deprived that she’s paddling in place, suffering agonies without an inch of progress. Hubris keeps her afloat. But it also forces her to jump back into the water.
Diana doesn’t pity herself, so neither does the film. Instead, the audience’s empathy is rerouted to Diana’s support team, particularly her weary navigator, John (Rhys Ifans), forever crouched over a map of sea currents, and the film’s second lead, Bonnie, her head coach who is, in essence, a temperature-controlled Jacuzzi overlooking Hurricane Diana. A former racquetball champion and, briefly, Diana’s ex, Bonnie has long since forgiven her friend’s flaws. Their scenes together capture decades of camaraderie in effortless shorthand. Though this is Vasarhelyi and Chin’s first narrative feature, they’re good with actors — although, in fairness, casting Bening and Foster (and their four Oscar nominations each) is like arriving at the poker table with a pair of aces. You get everything about the pair in an early scene when Bonnie throws her best pal the surprise birthday party that she swears she doesn’t want (but, of course, does) only to be ratted out at the door when Diana squints, “Did you blow-dry your hair?”
The film switches tones choppily. There’s a scene where a character coughs once and immediately announces that they’re terminally ill. When the swimming is rough, the editing froths into a horror movie with Diana haunted by visions of her sexually abusive childhood coach, Jack Nelson (Eric T. Miller); later, in a halcyon stretch, the film becomes a semi-animated phantasmagoria with Diana posing under the waves like Esther Williams above an imaginary Taj Mahal, colorful fish swirling about her ankles. Diana wants our respect — and by the end of the movie, she’s earned it. While she’s one of the prickliest protagonists you’ll see this year, she’s so raw and earnest and apologetically herself that you adore her anyway — from the safe distance of the screen. But weep for her neighbors, who she wakes up every day at dawn with a bugle blast of “Reveille.”
Nyad
Rated PG-13 for salty language and references to childhood sexual abuse. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
