Water world: Nyad (Annette Bening) pushes herself on the Cuba-Florida strait. Photo / Supplied
Water world: Nyad (Annette Bening) pushes herself on the Cuba-Florida strait. Photo / Supplied
Jodie Foster and Annette Bening bring their formidable talents to this frequently exciting depiction of American long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s greatest achievement and her devastating failures.
It’s a fictionalised biopic of the real-life endurance athlete (Bening) known by just her single-syllable nickname. It begins in 2009 with the retired marathonswimmer, approaching her 60th birthday, grappling with what her legacy will be. “Where’s the excellence?” she snaps at her long-suffering best friend and trainer Bonnie (a wonderfully warm Foster). The answer lies in one body of water, unconquered: the 177km strait between Florida and Cuba, which Nyad had last attempted more than 30 years before.
The plot trajectory is typical of a sports movie: perseverance, adversity, foiled triumph, repeat (in this case, several times). What you may not expect is two such strong, committed performances by Foster and Bening, a double Oscar winner and a four-time Oscar nominee respectively. Foster’s supportive best mate Bonnie is the yang to Bening’s driven Nyad, a self-obsessed woman groomed from childhood to become a champion swimmer, her father reminding her that her destiny lay in their Greek surname meaning “water nymph”.
Bening eschews physical and emotional vanity as she plays Nyad as blinkered, selfish, unlikeable yet believable. Acclaimed documentary directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have brought nail-biting endurance stories to the big screen before, with mountain-climbing doco Free Solo, and The Rescue about the young Thai football team trapped underground.
Here, working with actors and a screenplay for the first time, they intermingle misty-lensed dramatisations of Nyad’s youth with grainy archive footage of the actual Nyad doing exhausting, long-haul swimming though waters containing sharks, jellyfish and Rhys Ifans – actually, he’s great as Nyad’s support boat skipper. The flashbacks are a little heavy-handed with her shouty but loving father and charming but creepy coach. But as the film regularly reminds you, this is about how one determined woman began training for the swim of her life at age 60, which is something that can’t help but inspire respect and admiration.
If it wasn’t such a straightforward crowd-pleaser in its telling, you might wonder if this will deliver Bening a fifth Oscar nod.
★★★½
IN CINEMAS NOW. STREAMING ON NETFLIX FROM NOVEMBER 3
