Annette Bening’s portrayal of a legendary swimmer in Nyad finally succumbs to narrative cliché.
For years, the filmmaking staff of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi has specialised in making documentaries about athletes and adventurers who push the very limits of human survival. The administrators’ essential peak got here with the 2018 documentary Free Solo, however in works comparable to Meru and The Rescue they painted portraits of mountaineers and cave divers who exist to carry out nigh-impossible feats of endurance. So it’s no shock that their first foray into making a story characteristic intently resembles that type of documentary: Nyad, a biopic in regards to the distance swimmer Diana Nyad, whose athletic targets had been difficult to the purpose of being absurd.
Nyad (performed by Annette Bening) is an open-ocean swimmer who set varied information in her 20s, together with swimming from the Bahamas to Florida in file time again in 1979. However she by no means accomplished a extra formidable, extra harmful journey from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, some 110 miles lengthy, thwarted by robust winds in her preliminary makes an attempt. Chin and Vasarhelyi’s movie, which adapts Nyad’s personal autobiography, finds the athlete popping out of retirement in her 60s to aim the Cuba-to-Florida journey once more, supported by her greatest pal and coach, Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster).
The concept of anybody swimming that distance within the open ocean is hard to think about, however for a 60-something lady whose final severe athletic efforts got here throughout the Carter administration, it feels significantly unimaginable. Bening’s efficiency is thus centered on capturing Nyad’s overwhelming, bullheaded stubbornness, her most vital asset as she barrels towards a seemingly insurmountable objective. And Bening is as much as the duty—she’s at all times had distinctive fearlessness in letting her characters’ flaws communicate for themselves, profitable audiences over with sheer pressure as a substitute of breezy appeal. Foster is the proper steadiness alongside her, depicting Bonnie as easygoing to the intense, a one-woman help system who helps Nyad navigate the advanced enterprise of assembling a staff to deal with the Caribbean Sea.
However for nearly everything of Nyad’s operating time, I couldn’t assist however suppose how a lot better the movie would have functioned as a pure documentary. The true Diana Nyad is a prickly and controversial determine in her world, possessing the type of intense persona that Bening can do solely a lot to mimic. She additionally has precisely the type of singularly pushed thoughts that Chin and Vasarhelyi are good at probing—their portrait of the rock climber Alex Honnold in Free Solo was as centered on the stilted features of his social life because it was on the technical particulars of summiting El Capitan. However by making Nyad a story movie, the film succumbs to lots of boring biopic-storytelling shorthand; Nyad generally states her targets and fears aloud in the course of dialog. A lot of the thuddingly expositional dialogue can not escape the sense that it sprouted from an expanded Wikipedia web page.
Maybe Nyad’s huge swims, which occurred within the early 2010s, by no means produced the amount of compelling, high-quality footage that Chin and Vasarhelyi use for his or her documentaries, necessitating the biopic method. The very best a part of the film is thus the filmmakers’ cautious re-creation of the circumstances of Nyad’s swims—monotonous crawls by means of uneven currents that took dozens of hours and required her to find a meditative state to be able to keep away from submitting to pure ennui. The always-reliable Rhys Ifans does attention-grabbing work as John Bartlett, the grizzled navigator who drives a ship alongside Nyad and helps her chart a course. A number of the particulars of Nyad’s course of are splendidly unusual, such because the full-body rubber swimsuit she dons to keep away from lethal jellyfish stings.
Once more, although, all of this is able to most likely be higher represented in a pure documentary, which might stack up these unusual details and dig slightly deeper into simply how polarizing an individual Nyad is within the insular world of distance swimming. As an alternative, Chin and Vasarhelyi go no additional than acknowledging her as a powerful character; by the tip, the movie leans into platitudes about by no means giving up and following your goals which are higher suited to motivational posters than to dramatic artistic endeavors. Nyad’s compulsion is so uncommon, and her strategies of attaining her swim goals had been so elaborate, that I used to be by no means fully bored by Nyad. However, if you happen to’ll pardon the pun, I used to be left questioning in regards to the protagonist’s interior depths.