Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Treading Water: Film Review of Nyad
★★★☆☆
Biopics can be tricky. Creating a film about the life of a notable person can either transcend the material and become more than just one person’s life story or become enamored of—or mired in—sundry details of that life to the point where the audience begins to feel isolated and alienated from that person—losing sight of the forest for the trees, if you will.
For instance, this year’s Oppenheimer not only chronicles the life of the famous physicist and father of the atomic bomb, it also transcends one man’s life to examine the problem of social conscience subsumed by the lures of power and fame.
Oppenheimer is forced to wrestle with questions bigger than himself. Should he have directed his team to take a calculated risk of destroying all of humanity by starting a fission reaction? Should he have insisted on building the bomb even though it wasn’t necessary to beat the Nazis anymore? He did and opened a Pandora’s box, which he later regretted. His story transcends himself, reaching almost mythic proportions (see Prometheus).
Schindler’s List is another biopic that also addresses similar thematic concerns about moral struggles versus personal gain. Other notable films, like Raging Bull, Moneyball, and Lincoln, also stretch beyond the personal struggles of their subjects to transcend the content of the biography itself. This is what makes a great biopic.
Sadly, the film Nyad, the biography of world-famous marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, does not. Adapted from Nyad’s autobiography by Julia Cox and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl and Jimmy Chin, the movie chronicles the epic dedication and single-minded determination of Diana Nyad to achieve her life’s dream, to swim the one hundred and ten miles from Cuba to Key West non-stop.
The film begins with a montage of Nyad’s career accomplishments, including swimming around the island of Manhattan, from the Bahamas to Florida, finishing the Bay of Naples race in record time, and, finally, her retirement and subsequent career as a broadcaster.
The film moves to 2010 as Diana (Annette Bening) and her friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster) celebrating her sixtieth birthday with a surprise party. Later that night, Diana runs across a poem by Mary Oliver which inspires her to take up her lifelong dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida. Persuading Bonnie to coach her, Nyad sets off on her relentless quest to achieve this goal. And so the process begins.
Nyad is able to persuade others to join the crew, including navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), helmsperson Dee Brady (Karly Rothenberg), shark wranglers, medics, and suit designers to work for free, even though they put in hundreds of hours, some of them putting their jobs in jeopardy. She also persuades sponsors to put up the money necessary to buy the necessary equipment. Diana is relentless, single-minded, and completely selfish in the pursuit of her dream, but she pushes her team as hard as she pushes herself.
She makes her first attempt to cross the Florida straits in August of 2011 but unfavorable ocean currents and an allergic reaction to some food abort the attempt. Nyad forces the team to regroup for another attempt a month later but this time is stung by box jellyfish. After leaping in to rescue her, the lead medic is also stung. Nyad insists on continuing but has to stop when she is stung again.
Diana awakes in the hospital to see Bonnie sitting at her side, who tells her that she almost died and that trying the swim again would be far too dangerous. Nyad, of course, does not want to hear and stubbornly insists on trying again. She and Bonnie enlist the help of a box jellyfish expert who provides a protective suit. Despite personal sacrifices, her crew sticks with her for yet another attempt. Although Bartlett warns Diana that bad weather is jeopardizing their narrow exit window, Diana insists they leave and is almost lost during a tremendous thunderstorm, capping yet another unsuccessful attempt.
Refusing to give in, Diana pushes Bonnie to start planning for another attempt, prompting a fight after which Bonnie quits as her coach. Diana eventually apologizes to John and reconciles with Bonnie. She also, in a couple of seemingly arbitrary sequences, comes to terms with the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager at the hands of her swimming coach. Finally, the rest of her original crew relents, prompting a fourth attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida.
Besides being a classic Hollywood biopic, Nyad is also a sports movie, displaying all that genre’s traditional tropes: the underdog story, the me against the world story, and the hero with the feet of clay narrative. But unlike Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, or Moneyball, there is an emotional vacuum at the center of Nyad. While Diana Nyad is a great athlete and an admirable person, she is eminently unlikable. Her fierce and single-minded determination is symptomatic of an aggressive egotism and narcissism. In her world, she is the only one who matters. And, while these characteristics may be the stuff from which championships are made, it does not make for a sympathetic movie hero.
Diana Nyad’s life story is a compelling one, but the Hollywood version of it is not. It contains all the necessary formulaic ingredients but somehow misses the mark. Diana’s character is, on her best days, annoying, and it’s hard to comprehend why her friend Bonnie—and everyone on the crew—puts up with her. The climactic ending, which in a traditional sports film would have the audience cheering or tearing up—seems flat and anticlimactic. Attempts to create sympathy for Nyad in flashbacks in which she is molested by her swimming coach as a teenager are—while harrowing—seem contrived attempts to elicit audience sympathy.
Despite having to portray a compulsive narcissist, a great performance is handed in by Annette Bening. She tempers Nyad’s obsessive behavior with a sort of clumsy charm, especially in the early part of the film highlighting her friendship with Bonnie, but for all her acting skill, Bening cannot save the film by herself. Jodie Foster does an adequate job portraying Bonnie, but the performance seems a little tinny and predictable.
For all its faults, Nyad is a celebration of womanhood, not only in the realm of athletics, but also, on a more realistic plane, in the Hollywood arena. Both Bening and Foster are successful actors in their sixties in an industry that worships youth.
Actresses have bemoaned the dearth of decent roles for middle-aged and older women for years, but—along with Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, actresses like Sandra Oh, Olivia Colman, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, and Marisa Tomei are all over fifty and still going strong. And of course, the grand dame Helen Mirren rules over all.
Nyad might be considered a metaphor for the determination and strength of woman who refuse to give in to a world that is reluctant to recognize them, until they insist—like Nyad—on being seen.