Stream It Or Skip It

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nyad’ on Netflix, Starring Annette Bening in a Portrait of a Swimmer on Fire

By John Serba Twitter @johnserba
Published Nov. 3, 2023, 5:00 p.m. ET

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It’s officially Oscar-bait biopic season, and leading the charge is Nyad (now streaming on Netflix), about the treacherous Cuba-to-the-Keys swim by famed marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, played by Annette Bening. Treacherous and controversial, considering the heated debate over the legitimacy of said swim – which occurred in 2013, when Nyad was 64 – as well as Nyad’s well-documented propensity for embellishing and fabricating portions of her biography and achievements. The first non-documentary feature by Free Solo and The Rescue directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the film adapts Nyad’s memoir and arrives with the swimmer’s endorsement. Translation: it softpedals her more troublesome “quirks” and leans heavily on the triumph-of-the-human-spirit stuff of many inspirational sports movies. Oh, and it’s also a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie with actual boats! 

NYAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s Diana Nyad’s (Bening) 60th birthday. She warns her bestie Bonnie (Jodie Foster) not to throw her a party, but of course she does it anyway, you know, surprise, and all their friends jump out. And here we get an ear- and eyeful of Nyad’s ego as she holds court and tells stories. Yes, she’s just “Nyad,” because it’s like her brand, and she’s singular, especially in her own mind, and she likes to tell everyone that the root word is “naiad,” which translates from Greek as “sea nymph.” When Bonnie pushes her toward a potential romantic interest, Nyad torpedoes it by going on and on and on about herself. A note about Nyad and Bonnie: They dated for a blip way back when, but then settled on being BFFs who kind of act like they’re married; they live in separate houses, although it doesn’t seem that way; they bicker and banter and it seems like they know each other better than they know anyone else. They’re kind of cute and funny and annoying and damn, if they weren’t being played by Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, you might be tempted to jump into the screen and throttle them. 

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Nyad has one of those I’m-getting-older moments where she takes a literal long, hard look in the mirror. When she was 28, she attempted an arduous 60-hour, 103-mile swim from Havana to Key West, but didn’t complete the journey. Her failure has been eating away at her, so back to the pool she goes, for the first time in 30 years. She pulls on dumbbells and hovers to tighten her core – and convinces Bonnie to be her coach as she tries the swim again. Anyone who says she’s too old or, you know, too female to do it just fuels her motivation. It’ll be cold and sometimes very dark and the back of her neck will be blistered from exposure and she’ll be hospitalized for fatigue and she’ll lose 20 pounds and hallucinate from lack of sleep and nourishment and she’ll use the ocean as a toilet and there are sharks to avoid and nasty jellyfish that will lash her face with poison tentacles and Bonnie will dangle noodles over the side of the boat so she can gobble them like a dolphin and nobody can ever ever touch her lest it not be an “unassisted” swim – but this is mind over matter, baby. Nothing will stop Nyad. Nothing. 

So she and Bonnie crew up. John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) is a key ally, the navigator who knows the currents and weather models and can plot a course. The first time she attempted the feat, Nyad swam in a shark cage attached to the boat, but she’ll forgo that for electronic gizmos that ward off the fish, and a pair of shark divers prepared to jump in and fend off any curious predators with a tennis-ball-tipped prod. And finally, once the conditions are right, she plays ‘Reveille’ on her bugle, bellows “courage” (but she pronounces it “coo-rahhj,” possibly to be extra annoying) and jumps in. Not a spoiler: She won’t make it. In fact, she won’t make it on the second or third tries, either. But if she didn’t eventually, this movie probably wouldn’t exist.

where to watch NYAD
Photo: Netflix

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Netflix has cornered the market in seafaring extreme sports movies: True Spirit is about a teenager who sailed around the world solo. No Limit is about a freediver attempting to break a record for deep-diving on a single breath. And The Deepest Breath is a documentary about a freediver attempting to break a record for deep-diving on a single breath. 

Performance Worth Watching: Bening is a narcissistic force as Nyad, but Foster’s characterization of Bonnie is far more lovable, grounding the movie and giving it a more recognizable, relatable point-of-view.  

Memorable Dialogue: Bonnie says to Nyad what we’re all thinking: “Do you have any idea how exhausting you are as a friend?”

Sex and Skin: A snapshot of the real Nyad’s tan lines during the closing credits.

NYAD. Annette Bening as Diana Nyad in NYAD
Photo: Kimberley French/Netflix

Our Take: Nyad traffics in all the clichés of the underdog/inspirational sports movie about someone who’s doing something insane and masochistic simply Because It’s There. (Back in 1978, the Cuba-to-the-U.S. “connection” she attempted carried greater symbolic political weight.) Which is fine, and Chin and Vasarhelyi execute their vision with a bit of poetic visual flair, albeit without ever really transcending formula. The music swells at the appropriate times, we get training montages and the narrative is cut with gauzy flashbacks to key moments from Nyad’s childhood (a significant one being her sexual abuse by a trusted coach when she was a teenager). 

That’s all pretty rote stuff, with rock-solid execution, even when the on-the-water sequences get repetitive: stroke stroke kick gasp, watch out for that life-threatening obstacle, repeat. No, these characters played by Foster and Bening are far more compelling than the sanded-and-polished fictionalization of Nyad’s achievements. Embracing them is an especially challenging exercise in cognitive dissonance: Nyad is akin to a spiny puffer fish – admirable, but prickly, and spending time with her is, from one moment to the next, aspirational and grating. Bening’s work is typically complex, balancing raw emotional sincerity with a lack of concern for crafting a lovable character; she opens the door so we can marvel at Nyad’s extraordinary determination, raise a concerned eyebrow at her madness (there isn’t a better word for her psychological state) and feel repulsed by her ostentatious arrogance. There are times when Bening grates on our nerves, but when she sticks her head above the water as Nyad is in the numbing throes of a days-long swim, and her eyes bulge and her mouth grimaces with unspoken pain, you have no choice but to believe her.

Bonnie is less complicated – hell, the majority of the Earth’s population is less complicated than Nyad – but the subtext of Foster’s performance is acceptance of who people are, for better or worse. Is she supporting Nyad, or enabling her? It’s not an easy question to answer. But it drums up thoughtful notions about what it takes to achieve superhuman tasks, be it physical endurance, psychological fortitude or intense, solipsistic focus. Nyad almost certainly wants us to ignore the exaggerations and nagging details that threaten to taint her legacy as a swimmer, and focus on the big-picture assertion that anyone who reaches nigh-impossible goals is undeniably inspirational. It’s not an entirely unreasonable argument, nor is the idea that a more accurate portrayal of Nyad and her compulsions would’ve made for a much stronger film. As it stands, it wants us to recognize that simple people have simple dreams, and complex people cross oceans with the power of their will.

Our Call: Nyad is a classic case of a cast of true pros elevating an otherwise boilerplate picture. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.