Chin, Jimmy (1973- )

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    ‘Nyad’ Review: Neptune’s (Estranged) Daughter

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    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.”NyadRated PG-13 for salty language and references to childhood sexual abuse. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Wild Life’ Review: Their Land Is Our Land

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      This documentary looks at the efforts of Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and Douglas Tompkins to preserve stretches of land in Argentina and Chile.“Wild Life,” the latest eco-conscious documentary from the filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo,” “Meru”) is a rickety helicopter tour of a fascinating marriage; nearly every scene makes you want to stop and explore in more detail. Things move fast with barely a beat of introduction. Those unfamiliar with the American philanthropists Kristine McDivitt Tompkins and her husband, Douglas Tompkins, may feel in the film’s opening minutes as disoriented as if they’ve been dropped in the wilderness. One catches on that the Tompkins purchased a lot of it: more than one million acres in Argentina and Chile, with the goal of gifting the land back as recognized national parks. The scale of the couple’s ambition teeters on the surreal. Asked in archival footage about a massive snow-flocked volcano on the horizon, Doug casually replies, “Yeah, that came with it.”The film doesn’t do much besides pair snippets of the Tompkins’ biographies with staggeringly beautiful shots of Patagonia’s natural splendors. An early effort to structure the running time around Kris’s first summit of a mountain named in her honor by her husband, who died in 2015, unspools clumsily and is eventually set aside. Chin, a climber himself, joined Kris on the trek and must have decided the footage was less interesting than the story that brought her and Doug to Chile in the first place — an unusual adventure in 20th-century capitalism that begins in 1968 with Doug and his friend Yvon Chouinard embarking on a nine-month van expedition through South America and returning home to each start apparel companies: one would found Esprit; the other, Patagonia.These two mountaineers on the precipice of great wealth were also free-spirited “dirtbags,” a word Chin uses with reverence. Yvon doesn’t disagree, explaining, “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.” Yvon would soon hire a teenage Kris to work at Patagonia as an assistant packer; she rose to become chief executive. In her 40s, Kris met and married Doug, completing the loop.Chin and Vasarhelyi, married themselves, understand the unity and isolation couples experience when spurred by a shared goal. The details of negotiating this staggering land donation with Chile’s former president Michelle Bachelet include a moment of suspense that’s hard to follow. (The filmmakers seem too shy to ask questions about costs and legal clauses.) But what is clear is the Tompkins’ twin passions for nature and romance, which merge in the metaphors Kris uses to describe her husband’s effect on her life: “You get hit by lightning,” she beams, adding later, “Once, I was a pebble in a stream. Not anymore.”Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans. We’re tantalized by a glimpse of Patagonia meetings held barefoot and cross-legged on the corporate carpet, an allusion to Yvon and Doug’s competition to run the most ethical company (though there’s no need for the klutzy needle-drop of the Tears for Fears hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”), and a hasty mention of Doug’s efforts to course-correct the environmentally destructive fast-fashion industry with a 1990 Esprit advertisement asking mall rat teenagers whether their clothes are “something you really need.” I’d watch a real-time documentary on just that next board meeting.Wild LifeRated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Return to Space’ Review: Eyes on the Skies

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      Platitudes prevail in this overlong documentary about the partnership between NASA and SpaceX.Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, “Return to Space,” a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.This is in part because the company’s decades-long effort to design a reusable rocket is presented almost entirely in altruistic terms, the tests and failures cushioned by a cloud of for-all-mankind babble. NASA’s space shuttle program might have ended 11 years ago, but the need to blast our astronauts into the thermosphere (and onto the International Space Station) remains. Enter Musk, whose belief that humans will be a “multi-planet species” — and whose company was the only viable option — made him the perfect candidate for a $1.5 billion government contract to deliver rockets to NASA.While the filmmakers, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, struggle to wring drama from weather delays and anxious suits clustered around consoles, we hang out, pleasantly enough, with the two delighted astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) who will make the flight. Footage from multiple sources (including video diaries and NASA space cameras) is woven together with interviews containing more starry-eyed boosterism than compelling information.Aside from a few grumpy lawmakers, “Return to Space” is notable for its almost total lack of naysayers regarding this public-private collaboration. Ignoring the transactional in favor of the inspirational, the film pays no heed to SpaceX’s commercial endeavors — watching it, you’d think making money was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.“We made a point of humanizing Elon,” Chin says in the production notes. Yet the partnership’s uninvestigated details seem consequential, and skeptics might be forgiven their anxiety about what tech companies could get up to in outer space. We’ve seen what they’ve done on Earth.Return to SpaceNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More