The loftier and more dangerous the goal, the finer the line that separates the Guinness Book of World Records from the Darwin Awards. At a certain point, surviving is the only real difference. Do-or-die marathon swimmer Diana Nyad dreamed of swimming from Cuba to Florida. That’s 110 miles of unpredictable open ocean. Prior to her, the only ones to have done it used a shark cage to shield them from life-threatening aquatic predators. Diana first tried and failed when she was 28. Decades later, she decided to go again, failing three more times.
If Diana Nyad sounds stubborn, you have no idea. Directed by “Free Solo” helmers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, making the leap from documentaries to fiction with a fact-based narrative that feels perfectly suited to their skill set, the Netflix movie “Nyad” is a portrait of obsession. It’s an almost single-minded account of Diana’s multiple attempts to swim that stretch.
In a performance that feels every bit as committed as the athlete she’s depicting, Annette Bening plays a woman who braved storms, being stung by box jellyfish and even a shark attack to reach her goal. Those factors represent the obstacles in her path, but the movie hardly has room for subplots. “Nyad” has a one-track mind, and while the experience is long and repetitive enough that you’ll probably emerge with the mental equivalent of prune fingers, feeling as if you made that 53-hour swim yourself, the takeaway is obvious: Never give up.
Unlike other sports movies, “Nyad” focuses on a fighter whose adversary in achieving her goal was herself. For a few minutes, a younger swimmer comes along to give it a shot, but this is essentially a solo endeavor — albeit one that wouldn’t have been possible without a dedicated team that included coach Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster), all-but-mute captain Dee Brady (Karly Rothenberg), self-sacrificing navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) and marine expert Angel Yanagihara (Jeena Yi), who suggested the suit that prevented Diana from being stung to death by box jellyfish.
“Nyad” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, where plenty of audiences found it inspiring, and yet, the thing on practically everyone’s lips was how unlikable they found Bening’s character. The strange thing about that charge is how her take on Diana Nyad seems no different from a hundred male heroes that audiences have adored over the years. If anything, that’s what we expect from Jack Bauer or James Bond: for them to become human locomotives, charging toward whatever goal at the expense of civility, rules and personal relationships. But show an equivalently driven female protagonist, and it upsets people
