In the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin came upon a doozy of a character in Alex Honnold, an unhinged, unsupported climber with little regard for his own mortality. It was a perfectly terrifying and fascinating film, the nightmarish sight of Honnold hanging from the edge of a 900-metre rock seared into the brain of anyone who saw it.
The pair were able to film every hair-raising moment of his record-breaking climb, the ethics of which were smartly explored within the movie, and it turned an extreme sports documentary into an immersive, edge-of-seat thriller. But their lack of on-location involvement in their follow-up, the Thai cave doc The Rescue, gave it a drier, less dynamic feel, an anonymous assemblage of clips telling a story we all knew a little too well. Nyad, their narrative debut, finds the pair in uncharted territory, the tale of another daring endeavour but one they can bring to the screen with complete directorial control and without fear of blood on their hands.
Diana Nyad (Annette Bening, gunning for that long-awaited and long-deserved first Oscar) is entering her 60s with understandable reticence. She spent much of her younger years breaking records and boundaries with her long-distance swimming but her greatest goal, to swim the 101-mile journey from Cuba to Florida, has forever been a dream unrealised. With swirling fears of age and feelings of mediocrity, she returns to the pool, her first swim for years and it reawakens that thirst, setting her on a mission that many call impossible, including her best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster, gunning for that third Oscar), who is soon convinced to not only support Diane but to coach her as well.
Her journey back to the spotlight, and record books, is busied with snippets of real news footage, clips of a younger Nyad, flashbacks to childhood abuse and songs that soundtracked her trek. It’s at times reminiscent of Wild, 2014’s moving mosaic capturing Reese Witherspoon on another difficult expedition, in which the director Jean-Marc Vallée found ways to emulate the many sparking sounds and memories that can come to one when the mind is allowed to wander (it remains one of the most effective portrayals of what it feels like to be alone and in thought). But Vasarhelyi and Chin’s flourishes aren’t quite as well-handled. The flashes to the real Nyad are distracting, removing us from the reality of the film, while the underpowered shards of memory are visually flat and unmoving. Despite the many picture-painting additions, the script, from the TV writer Julia Cox, is never able to fully clue us in on why Nyad would be so determined to take on such a wild endurance test. At times it feels like the film is trapped somewhere between documentary and narrative, the latter perhaps picked because of a dearth of footage of the centrepiece swim.
So much of the film is inevitably set in the water alongside Nyad as she trains and then finally makes her many attempts (the film follows four of them since the first official one was in 1978) but swimming isn’t an easily cinematic activity, and while there are some nice visual touches (Nyad swimming at night with a rope made of red lights is a particular eye-catcher), it’s never quite as involving as it should be. Of far more interest are the scenes outside of the water, allowing Bening to do more than splash around, and highlighting a friendship we rarely get to see on screen between two older gay women. The interplay between the pair, refreshingly devoid of romance, and the specific tension of a supporting character refusing to be taken for granted by the lead, all makes for more compelling drama.
While a dedicated Bening gives her all in a tough, physically demanding role, deserving of at least another nomination if not necessarily a win, it’s Foster who steals the film with a fine reminder of her easy charisma. We’ve barely seen the actor in the last decade, and before she makes her True Detective debut (a seemingly perfect match of actor and material), Nyad allows her to be a real person for once, a test that not many movie stars can ace quite this well. The pair have the chemistry of old friends and when they’re on screen together and on dry land, Nyad is swimmingly good.
Nyad is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released in cinemas on 20 October and on Netflix on 3 November
