Category: Rhys Ifans

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.  

NOTTING HILL

By Marc S. Sanders

Notting Hill written by Richard Curtis (Love, Actually) and directed by Roger Michell is a pleasant surprise of a romantic comedy. It’s not a perfect film but it certainly loves every one of its quirky supporting characters, as well as its two straight romantic leads played by Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant.

Grant plays Will Thacker who lives in the Notting Hill district of London where every proprietor is a charming little shop of some form or other; a quaint street where merchants appear on the sidewalks during the weekends selling their art or homemade jams or coffee products. Will owns a travel book shop located across the street from his flat that is whimsically recognized by its big blue front door. His wife left him for another man and now he’s relegated himself to living with a roommate called Spike (character actor Rhys Ifans doing a British equivalent of Cosmo Kramer, Seinfeld’s neighbor).

One day the superstar celebrity Anna Scott (Roberts) simply strolls into Will’s store. They have a quiet moment and he sells her a travel book about Turkey that he didn’t recommend she purchase. Moments later they run into each other down the street when Will spills orange juice all over Anna. From there, a meet cute relationship begins to unfold. It’s not so simple for the pair though as Anna’s enormous celebrity is hard to negotiate; hard for Anna, not hard for Will.

Anna is at ease when she can have a quiet dinner to celebrate Will’s sister’s birthday with his friends or when she can escape her turbulent life of gossip magazines and paparazzi by taking shelter at Will’s flat, even if grungy looking Spike walks in on her taking a bath.

I like Notting Hill. However, the quiet moments shared between Grant and Roberts sometimes carry on too long. Oh my gosh!!!! Will someone say something already????? Hugh Grant has made characters that trip over their words and stumble with what to say into a master craft. Julia Roberts is one actress that a camera loves especially when she’s distressed. A crying moment in any one of her films will milk the scene for every blush, or glassy eye or tear and whisper she can offer. She’s a terrifically skilled actress in almost any film she does. Eventually, we have to move on from all of this though. My patience for some scenes were just running way too long for me at times. Kiss already!!!! Make love already!!!! Scream at each other already!!!!

Fortunately, there’s much escape to be had with the supporting cast, especially Ifans as Spike who is the most absent minded, lovable, dirty underwear wearing and sloppy prig imaginable. Emma Chambers is just as fetching with her scarlet pigtailed haircut as Will’s sister, Honey. Tim McInnery, Gina McKee, James Dreyfus and Hugh Bonneville round out this madcap collection. The birthday dinner party is a great scene for this ensemble as a comedic but relaxed chemistry blends nicely during a competition to see who is suffering the most to earn the last brownie on the dessert plate. The group is unsure how to include a movie star like Anna in their simplicity but Julia Roberts pulls off a trick that even had me fooled. Simply put, for the whole cast, there’s just that much more life and vibrancy when they are all together and it’s not just relegated to only Roberts and Grant in a scene.

Another special moment occurs later when the couple have split up once again. To depict time fleeting by, Roger Michell offers up a transition of Will wearing one outfit but walking through the hustle and bustle of Notting Hill as the weather and seasons seamlessly change all around him from sunlight to rain to snow and spring sunlight again. You even get a glimpse of Honey starting a flirtatious relationship at the beginning of the sequence and by the time it’s over a minute later Honey is breaking up with the guy. It’s a wonderful moment of wordless narration to show Will’s struggle with moving on as time continues to pass by. More importantly, it allows the titled setting to be a character of its own. This is a great example of showing a lovesick character unable to move on while life has no patience to wait for him to catch up.

I like Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts whether it’s in Notting Hill or one of their many other fine movies. I can’t deny the chemistry they have in this film. It works. I only wanted a little more life to the material that was handed to them. Still, Notting Hill is charming and simply a very sweet romantic comedy.