Nyad review: Dirs. Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi

An enjoyable and uplifting adventure, with performances from Bening and Foster that will almost certainly be swimming into awards contention come the end of the year

The sports movie is often a difficult an adventure to navigate, especially for one tracking individual achievement or ambition, given that the only likely outcomes which make the story worth telling are that the protagonist triumphs over adversity or probably dies trying in the process. But Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have shown their adeptness in the documentary genre with Free Solo, and they’re equally at home with narrative nonfiction in the seemingly impossible story of a woman in her sixties attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida, with Nyad.

Diana Nyad was a swimmer with Olympic ambitions until a childhood illness robbed her of crucial speed. Instead, she turned her attentions to distance swimming, breaking the world record for swimming around Manhattan Island and swimming from the Bahamas to Florida, a distance of around 100 miles. But one achievement eluded her: an even longer journey from Havana to Key West on the southern tip of Florida, more than five times the distance covered in swimming the English Channel. An attempt to swim the distance in 1978 while in a shark tank ends in failure, and the swim remains uncompleted by her or anyone else.

Nyad (Annette Bening) celebrates her 60th birthday with her friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster), but despite not having swum in over three decades, she resolves that she is going to attempt to tick that one remaining box before it’s too late. Feeling that she has sufficient knowledge of swimming to manage the training, she instead recruits Bonnie as a motivational coach and partner in attracting sponsorship for the endeavour. She also puts together a motley crew of support staff, including gruff navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) and so-gruff-she-doesn’t-even-speak captain Dee Brady (Karly Rothenberg). She also decides she’s going to swim without a cage, meaning she’ll need to navigate not only the treacherous and fast-moving currents, but a channel filled with sharks and jellyfish which could end her attempts permanently.

Bening plays Diana with a supreme confidence, a necessary narcissism that underpins her unwavering belief that she can overcome all of the obstacles in her path. Foster is the pragmatist, seeing how important her friend’s goals are to her but realising the strain that puts on everyone else around her. Nyad is unable to be in any social situation – even a children’s party – without talking obsessively about her targets and methods, but when translated to the water her cast-iron commitment only gets her so far in her pursuit of the inconceivable.

Chin and Vasarhelyi, working from a script by Diana Cox based on Nyad’s own memoir of the adventures, employ two ticking clocks to track the swimmer’s progress: using the time and distance of the attempt in question to demonstrate her position in the Gulf Of Mexico, but also indicating her age at the start of each attempt, a much more ominous portent of the challenge Nyad has imposed upon herself. Their previous films, including tracking Alex Honnold’s attempts to scale El Capitan in Free Solo, demonstrated their cinematic eye for scale and drama and that’s well applied here. The physical limits that Nyad pushes herself well beyond extend to hallucinations and that gives the directing duo chance to bring surreal splashes of colour to the film’s palette.

Their biggest collective success though is making this study in obsession satisfyingly funny while still maintaining an air of jeopardy. Bening and Foster are an absolutely winning combination, firing off each other and exhibiting a believable lifelong friendship. Bening also sells the stoicism, and her journey to finding the most critical ingredient to her success: the ounce of humility needed to keep the team together, but which might prove harder than a hundred mile swim through shark-infested waters.

There’s also an absurd humour about some of the lengths to which the pair need to go in the pursuit of success: when jellyfish stings present yet another obstacle, Nyad recruits another expert Angel (Jeena Yi), whose wetsuits and face coverings are entertainingly ridiculous; at one point, Nyad looks like a pantomime robber who’s dropped her swag bag somewhere in the water. Chin and Vasarhelyi balance the tone and keep the pace moving, before the do-or-die final attempt.

It’s never edge-of-the-seat gripping but it is constantly inspiring, as Diana understands the absolute limits of achievement and pushes past the boundaries of age. The only element which jars slightly against the other story in Nyad is a thread woven through of how alleged abuse from her childhood coach Jack Nelson (Eric T. Miller), and the injustice of his lack of reprisals despite the treatment of her and others, has also fired her motivation. The dream-line-flashbacks never quite get into the full issue or give enough context to Diana’s overall motivation, and that’s one element that could have benefitted from another pass in both script and treatment.

Overall, though, Nyad is an enjoyable and uplifting adventure, with performances from Bening and Foster that will almost certainly be swimming into awards contention come the end of the year.