Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin (2023)
As the years and roles go by, it looks decreasingly likely that Annette Bening will win the Academy Award that her talents richly deserve. Glenn Close, of course, is regarded as the prime living example of always-the-Oscar-bridesmaid syndrome and the numbers don’t lie: Close’s eight acting nominations without a win is a women’s all-time record (equalling the score of Peter O’Toole, who tops the men’s division). But although Bening has been nominated only four times to date, it’s rougher justice that she’s always been passed over (and not just because she’s the finer actress). Whereas I don’t think any Close performance deserved the Oscar for the year in question, Annette Bening should have won for American Beauty (1999) and probably also for The Kids Are All Right (2010), overrated though that film is. On paper, Nyad, in which Bening plays the title character, looks a suitable vehicle to change her Oscar fortunes. It’s the story of real-life, never-say-die heroism: in 2013 Diana Nyad, sixty-four years old and at her fifth attempt, became the first person to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West, Florida without the protection of a ‘shark cage’ – a distance of some 110 miles, requiring over fifty hours of continuous swimming. What’s more, preparing for and making this film must have been, for sixty-five-year-old Bening, an exceptionally arduous physical undertaking. This combination of well-established ingredients for Oscar success surely won’t be enough. Nyad, despite getting one of the gala premiere slots at the London Film Festival, is just too formulaic, thin and clumsy.
The wife-and-husband directing team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin is best known for their extreme sports documentaries, especially Free Solo (which, in 2019, did win an Academy Award). Although their track record might seem to qualify them for Nyad, neither has directed drama before. The resulting film doesn’t suggest they’ve any talent for it although inexperience may have been what led them wrongly to believe the screenplay they were working with – by Julia Cox, whose first cinema script this is – was up to scratch. Adapted from Diana Nyad’s 2015 memoir Find a Way, Cox’s screenplay quickly establishes the frequently argumentative but enduring friendship of Diana and Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster); it then gets to work on the heroine’s big swim project. In her youth, Diana Nyad was a renowned marathon swimmer; retiring in 1979 at the age of thirty, she embarked on a long, successful career in TV and radio sports journalism. (Perhaps thanks to their background in documentaries, Vasarhelyi and Chin are happy, instead of staging reconstructions, to insert library film of the real Nyad swimming in the 1970s.) We get that it’s a combination of her sixtieth birthday and the sentiment of a Mary Oliver poem that tells Diana to seize the day and resume endurance swimming (the Oliver lines ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?’ are repeated more often than necessary). We get that the Cuba to Florida swim is, for Diana, unfinished business – something she tried and failed to complete in her late twenties. Beyond that, the storytelling is uninformative. There’s next to nothing about the psychological effect of her first abortive Havana-Key West swim. It evidently didn’t cause her immediate retirement: the following year, according to Wikipedia, Nyad ‘set a world record for distance swimming (both men and women) over open water … [of] 102 miles’. Yet when she goes to a local swimming pool in 2009 we learn from her conversation with Bonnie that this is the first time in three decades that Diana has swum at all. How come?
Nyad certainly doesn’t waste time getting its protagonist back in the ocean. Not many screen minutes after a few lengths at the local pool, she’s all set to go from Havana. Unless you know more of the facts than I did when I watched the film, this speed of progress is disorienting. The brief plot synopsis on the LFF website makes clear that Diana will succeed in her quest: how are they going to spin the story out to two hours? The answer, obviously enough, is by giving plenty of screen time to all four of her attempts on the swim between 2011 and 2013. These include some beautiful marine and underwater images by Claudio Miranda (who has form in this kind of cinematography: he shot Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012)); Diana suffers asthma attacks, jellyfish and Portuguese-man-of-war stings and the close attention of sharks. After each failure, there’s dejection and increasingly big fall-outs with Bonnie, who is Diana’s trainer as well as her cheerleader, and/or John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), Nyad’s navigator. But the film, despite that brisk start, moves more and more slowly. Since the eventual outcome is certain, Nyad has to be an engrossing character study to stay interesting. In this respect, it’s dead in the water.
For Tegan Vevers, whose name is on the LFF synopsis of Nyad, the identity of the heroine is enough to render individual characterisation superfluous: ‘With so few contemporary films centred around older female protagonists,’ writes Vevers, ‘this beautifully made celebration of a queer female athlete in her 60s is nothing less than a sublime cinematic gift’. In fact, queerness counts for very little here (beyond ticking a box). We gather that Diana and Bonnie are lesbian but were an item only briefly and many years ago. They’re friends, not lovers; their other interactions throughout the film are almost entirely with men. Two of the latter feature in flashbacks to Diana’s childhood (where she’s played by identical twins, Belle and Pearl Darling, at the age of five and by Anna Harriette Pittman at the age of fourteen). The flashbacks to Diana’s home life are perfunctory (it’s disappointing to learn that her miraculously apt surname was inherited from her stepfather: she’s not a born water nymph after all). Those describing her teenage swim years are supposed to be anything but: it’s alleged that Diana’s coach, Jack Nelson (Eric T Miller), sexually abused her and other girls on the swim team. The trouble is, such revelations in fact-based drama are by now not only deplorable but predictable – at least when the predator is played and photographed as obviously as he is here. To make matters worse – more clichéd – Diana recalls an instance of Nelson’s abuse just as she’s being approached by an Atlantic Ocean shark.
Nyad makes the injustice of Bening’s Oscarlessness salient by partnering her with Jodie Foster. As Bonnie Stoll, Foster is highly competent but weirdly uninteresting. That combination runs nearly all the way through her career as an adult performer although it didn’t stop her winning the Best Actress Oscar twice in the space of four years in the late 1980s/early 1990s. (Foster has never been as extraordinary as she was in Taxi Driver (1976), as a thirteen-year-old.) Annette Bening gives a forceful, dominant performance but Diana Nyad is too narrow – or narrowly written – a character for her to show even a small part of her range. Bening’s exhaustion, as Diana finally struggles ashore at Key West, is amazing but it’s a long wait for that. We know after a couple of minutes of the film that Diana doesn’t suffer fools gladly (or anyone else much), that she’s fiercely single-minded and strong willed. Since that’s more or less it, she becomes a stentorian, repetitive pain in the neck. Just about the only amusing detail is her exuberant celebration when another, much younger woman fails in her attempt on the Cuba-Florida marathon. While Diana is swimming, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin put on the screen a clock/mileometer, showing how long she has been going and the distance covered. I’m sorry to say that, anxious for Nyad to be over, I gave this visual aid to the film’s progress quite a lot of attention.
10 October 2023
