Nyad review – a sol­id, female-front­ed sports saga

Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of mature women in movies about endurance sports has tra­di­tion­al­ly been rather lim­it­ed in both fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary fea­ture film­mak­ing. And so Nyad, from co-direc­tors Jim­my Chin and Eliz­a­beth Chai Vasarhe­lyi (the pair behind the beloved 2018 climb­ing doc, Free Solo), sets to redress the bal­ance, focus­ing on the extreme-dream exploits of bull­ish marathon swim­mer Diana Nyad and her numer­ous attempts to swim the treach­er­ous body of water between the Havana coast­line in Cuba to the shores of Key West in Flori­da, her epic jour­ney only offi­cial­ly com­plete once her two ankles have ascend­ed from the brine.

What becomes clear rather quick­ly as this isn’t just a case of mind over mat­ter and pos­i­tive men­tal atti­tude, but it’s com­plex pro­duc­tion that – much like a com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion – requires the per­fect set of con­di­tions for suc­cess­ful exe­cu­tion. Nyad, as played by Annette Ben­ning, is over­flow­ing with The Right Stuff, but no amount of vim and vigour is going to pre­vent a Box Jel­ly­fish from admin­is­ter­ing its poi­son into your face when you’re 40 hours into your swim. 

So the film is struc­tured as a case of tri­al and error, with Nyad and her giant-spec­ta­cled train­er, Bon­nie Stoll (Jodie Fos­ter), prov­ing to be glut­tons for pun­ish­ment when it comes to spend­ing long stretch­es on the chop­py seas find­ing out how nature is going to scup­per anoth­er shot at the prize. The film charts three of four failed attempts at the cross­ing, and hav­ing to watch so much marathon swim­ming does occa­sion­al­ly mir­ror the metro­nom­ic tedi­um of actu­al­ly being out there in the water.

Ben­ning and Fos­ter make for fine spar­ring part­ners, with the for­mer soon being sub­sumed by ego­ma­nia and a sense that gets to boss all the crew around, and the lat­ter being torn between the fact of doing some­thing mem­o­rable so late in life, and kow­tow­ing to an arro­gant bitch who, if suc­cess­ful, will be the one col­lect­ing the spoils. Oth­er­wise the film’s dra­mat­ic arc is fair­ly con­ven­tion­al, yet it builds to a dénoue­ment that would have only the sad­dest of sacks fail­ing to punch the air.

Also worth men­tion­ing is Rhys Ifans as the com­mer­cial sailor who decides to come on board as nav­i­ga­tor, despite being the only one of the team who refus­es to take any of Nyad’s pea­cock­ing bull­shit. Through his char­ac­ter we get some decent expo­si­tion about gulf streams and weath­er sys­tems, all things that Nyad seems to care lit­tle about but that will even­tu­al­ly help her coast to victory.

There’s a super­fi­cial attempt to deal with some of the child­hood trau­mas that appar­ent­ly drove Nyad towards this Fitz­car­ral­do-like feat, but we only get a few short flash­backs and no real sense of whether this did help her men­tal­ly com­part­men­talise these per­sis­tent fears. It’s a film with some decent feel-good cre­do (if that type of thing floats your boat), and there’s cer­tain­ly val­ue in hav­ing a film about mature char­ac­ters that isn’t hor­ren­dous­ly win­some and patronising.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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