It’s meant for you to be a champion. Sixty-four-year old sportscaster and marathon swimmer Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) wants a challenge. She decides to resume her old vocation and recalling past attempts and her childhood ambition, decides to swim from Cuba to the United States, a 110-mile stretch of shark–infested waters. Her coach, friend and former lover Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster) is frustrated with their dealings and manages to get her to meet no-nonsense John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) an experienced sailor in the area to act as her guide. Finally the day arrives when storms abate and Diana has to tackle her own greatest challenge … What’s it been, like, thirty years since you put on a pair of googles? This adaptation by Julia Cox of Diana Nyad’s memoir Find a Way apparently plays loose with the facts, par for the course with biopics but disappointing, due perhaps to wanting to draw a veil over the childhood abuse which is tangentially mentioned. She is still alive, so that might be a factor too particularly for a woman who (allegedly) has a potentially elastic relationship with the truth about her accomplishments. Drawing a simplistic cause-effect line does not have any place here. Therefore the narrative feels as compressed in the same way that Diana’s attempt is – controlled by electronics and the limitations imposed by the nature of the task, no human contact, eating and defecating in the water. I don’t want an asterisk * next to my life’s greatest achievement. To a great extent this falls into the rise-fall-rise graph of the sports biopic. Bening’s Nyad is far from a water nymph – she’s an ornery older lady, somewhat didactic and stuck in her ways and comes off kind of like a bully: driven qualities perhaps necessary to take on such a gargantuan task. No money, no perks, no guarantees. In order to play this egotistical creature Bening ironically plays entirely without her own ego or vanity – going makeup free, allowing her inner beast to overwhelm people, trampling over everything to achieve her ends but of course she is the one who truly suffers. The film comes to life when Diana is presented with a male antagonist played by Ifans, one man who unlike the East Coast preppie who guided her to disaster years earlier, actually knows the Gulf Stream – it makes a change from the sharks. It’s their ocean. You’re just passing through. Foster has little to do other than act as metaphorical fluffer – perhaps an appropriate role for someone who was Diana’s lover before this aspect of their lives was dramatised. Foster does it perfectly well and perhaps this is also a significant role because for the first time she’s playing a Lesbian onscreen – something that must speak to her own issues having to avoid dealing with her private life despite the insistence of tabloids over decades past. You actually don’t know – you don’t have to do it. She and Bening make for an acting dream team and their byplay has a very realistic, natural affect. They’re good together: this former couple knows each other very well. Nyad has a songlist in her head to help her through the water, something that helps her achieve a rhythm. As she navigates her way through water and life and enemy territory with a team willing her on, our empathy grows, the scale of struggle palpable. If the film never quite musters the ‘dreamlike state’ avowedly experienced in distance swimming it’s not because every effort hasn’t been made to get there. Directed by Elizabeth Chai Vaserhelyi and Jimmy Chin, previously better known for the documentary Free Solo (2018). No one else can help you
mondomovies 