NYAD

By Marc S. Sanders

When some people go through a midlife crisis, they might buy themselves a car, get a new job or opt to not get out of bed for several days.  When Diana Nyad goes through a midlife crisis in her early sixties, she motivates herself to swim 103 miles from Cuba to Florida.  She came up short at age 28, but over thirty years later no one is going to convince her she shouldn’t try again.

Annette Bening portrays the real-life swimmer whose determination will bear the brunt of self-torture to complete arguably the maritime equivalent of climbing Everest.  Jodie Foster is Diana’s best friend and coach, Bonnie Stoll.  As acting partners and the characters they play, the leading ladies make a good pair.  

My first compliment has to go to the makeup department led by Ana María Andrickson.  The actresses received Oscar nominations, but the work done on Bening to play Nyad is astoundingly convincing. Diana makes several attempts to try to complete this challenge that’s never been accomplished before.  With each try, the dried-up complexion, blistering sunburns, chapped lips and bloodied cracks that prominently show on her body are truly painful and awfully uncomfortable to gaze upon.  At times, I was not as focused on the dialogue shared between Foster and Bening as I was on Andrickson’s masterful work.  The makeup alone tells an impactful story. A clear oversight by the Academy.

Annette Bening is particularly good in her role.  At times she’s a terrible annoyance and unlikable.  Yet, a sixty something year old woman who wants to defy all logic and the literal forces of nature will have to be a certain brand of jerk to move forward with her goals. This also comes with the natural degeneration of a body of freckled dry skin, loss of muscle mass and arthritic bones. Bening is far removed from the glamorous roles of an impressively long career past (Bugsy, American Beauty) to get to a persistent, unwavering zenith that the real Diana Nyad had to emote.

Jodie Foster is fine as Nyad’s best friend and former lover now coach.  I’m not sure all the award nominated praise she’s received for this part is merited, but she’s worthy of falling in line with other celebratory coaching mentors like Mickey from the Rocky films and Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid.  The film focuses so much on Diana Nyad though that there’s not much depth to Foster’s role.  She does the job, but it did not feel like it demanded much.  Frankly, Viola Davis in Air and Maura Tierny in The Iron Claw left me with more of an impression in an astounding year of great films and performances from 2023.

The unsung cast member who’s getting next to no press recognition is Rhys Ifans as John Bartlett, an oceanographer recruited by Nyad and Stoll to gauge immediate weather patterns and what the currents of the Atlantic are expected to do during the swimmer’s trek.  Ifans is a fantastic supporting character actor who is tasked with finding that suitable small window of time for Diana to start her journey. Within the context of the script, he offers the suspense needed for this sports film.  Can Diana Nyad hold up against the very real and insurmountable warnings that John describes?

Swimming is quite boring to watch.  However, this venture has cause for concerns.  Brutal storms, stinging jellyfish with undetectable approaches, and sharks.  Salt water, weakness and fatigue, the chops of the tide and mental hallucinations are also bears of contention.  A charter boat with Bonnie and John on board with a watchful, supportive crew sail alongside the swimmer, but they can only do so much if she intends to achieve her seemingly impossible goal unassisted.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are the directing team for Nyad with a script written by Julia Cox based on Diana Nyad’s novel account.  Most of the film is patterned like many other sports films focusing on an underdog.  I knew nothing about this person or her accomplishments.  Frankly, what I’ve learned is unbelievably impressive beyond what this picture focuses on.  Naturally, you’ll get an idea of how the story is going to conclude.

To enhance the ho hum activity of the swimming scenes, the filmmakers incorporate some of Nyad’s dreamlike delusions to get inside her head.  Falling rainbow stars onto the ocean surface as well as a yellow brick road leading to the Taj Mahal look as fantastical as they should, even if they drift into sidebar distractions.  I appreciated the handful of scenes where Rhys Ifans lays out the desperate concern shared with Jodie Foster about a lack of progress where Diana is wasting strokes against a current as well as his fear of oncoming sharks.  He builds suspense to keep the film focused. It’s pretty cool by the way how the crew responds to the shark issue.  

In addition, as good as Bening and Foster are with enormous careers of outstanding roles, much of their shared dialogue often comes off a little too hokey.  Granted, it’s a standard sports film and it’s more impressive that it’s all true, but Nyad sometimes plays off like a cheesy TV movie lacking that cinematic edge I was looking for.

An unclear element offers glimpses of Diana’s past as a beginner child swimmer who suffered personal trauma. It’s clear what happened to her, but these quick flashbacks are also mixed in with an unclear picture of her parental lineage and other ingredients.  I still don’t know why there were snippets of Diana playing Parcheesi.  Nor do I know who she was playing with to uphold its significance in the final edit of the movie.

Nyad is a biography worth seeing. The endurance the central character sustains to achieve the impossible is tremendously inspiring.  The thought that was running through my mind over the course of the film is that this woman wants to dominate over a powerful Mother Nature.  By the end, you see real life clips of Diana Nyad insisting to audiences that no matter who you are or what age you’re at in life, nothing can defeat what you want to overcome.  As well, whatever you succeed at likely deserves enormous credit for the support team that accompanied you.  Often, I’m a naysayer of Diana’s mantra because I think I’ve chalked up at least five times more failures than successes in my life.  Still, here is the person who eventually proved me wrong.  I should also note that I learn from my failures and remain hopeful that it will lead to success.

I often tell myself never to argue with a woman. Well, at least now I know never to argue with Diana Nyad.