Nyad (Chin and Vasarhelyi, 2023)
Nyad is a story so spectacularly unbelievable that were it not true, I would most likely be chiding the filmmakers for being irresponsible.
Glorifying the swimmer’s quest to swim from Cuba to Florida, a feat never before accomplished and which she herself failed to complete when she was thirty years younger, sounds more like Don Quixote than Rocky.
The maddening thing about Nyad, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit, is that it won’t settle for one or the other. There are too many things about Nyad’s obsessive, follow-my-dream, narcissism that hold one back from cheering unreservedly. Yet while it gestures at the darker side of obsession, the potential for tragedy always remains theoretical rather than actual. The cost of failure is a risk, not a reality, which makes the cost of success too easy to justify.
For all that, there is something awe-inspiring about contemplating a sixty-plus-year-old woman tackling a physical feat never before accomplished by athletes at their peak. I saw the film with two collegiate swimmers, and they both commented that the mental aspects of Nyad’s mission were as daunting and impressive as the physical aspects. Had the film committed to that message, it might have begun to answer the question of why the sixty-year-old Nyad succeeded where the thirty-year-old Nyad failed. Instead, it is content to just marvel at that fact rather than explore it.
“You need to make peace with the fact that I might die,” Nyad (Annette Bening) tells her coach and best friend, Bonnie (Jodie Foster). That statement does more than simply raise the stakes of failure, it says something about the trauma of contemplating and expecting rather than just experiencing failure. A slightly stronger movie might lean into that in ways this one never does. The relational strains caused by the athlete’s obsession are verbalized but never…resolved.
Or perhaps they are, just in ways that are less emotionally satisfying. Diana will be Diana. Those who love her must just accept her the way that she is. The film makes an interesting complement to Free Solo where the question of being one’s brother’s keeper is complicated by legitimate concerns regarding the athlete’s emotional and mental capacity. Nobody doubts that Diana is competent, but are there not other red flags that suggest that something is broken in her? Something that allows her to see others as means rather than ends? That talks the talk of being a team but walks the walk of the athlete standing alone?
On the other hand, I’m fifty-seven, and I found something deeply resonant about Diana’s refusal to simply accept that aging means loss, diminishment, and marginalization. It is a cliche that we live in a culture that worships youth. Somewhere mixed up in all this refusing to grow old is a legitimate, necessary point, that age and experience can be good and can produce insights and abilities that are more than mere consolation prizes for the loss of youthful strength and vitality.
Had Nyad been a great film, it might have been able to examine rather than simply admire. As a more facile but still good film, it settles for marveling at the marvelous.
