‘Nyad’ review: Swimming 110 miles in open water, never mind the sharks

Long-distance swimming in open water presents challenges beyond the physical grind. Think sharks. And venomous jellyfish. Those are just two of the potentially fatal problems Diana Nyad must contend with swimming from Cuba to Florida — nonstop and unaided — with only a support boat by her side to monitor her progress and squirt water and other nourishment down her throat every so often. Adapted from her memoir, the Netflix movie “Nyad,” starring Annette Bening, charts her arduous journey.

Your first question might be: Why? The movie struggles to find an answer beyond “because it’s there” and because of some emotional wounds from childhood that she’s looking to mend. But why this goal over any other? Why this stretch of water? We’re left to guess. But it’s a helluva accomplishment, one that no one has completed before or since.

An athlete and sports journalist, Diana is off-putting from the start, the kind of person who doesn’t talk so much as rant: “Laziness is contagious and we’re supposed to just nod along like it’s normal that everyone’s just surrendered to a banal existence?”

She’s restless and directionless, but is she interesting? The real Diana Nyad is; Bening’s self-serious, one-note interpretation less so. As the end credits role, the movie does itself no favors including clips of the real woman, whose personality and sense of humor come through even in those brief moments.

An accomplished long-distance swimmer in her youth, her 60th birthday is the catalyst that gets her back in the water to attempt the 110-mile, two-plus day endurance swim once again, three decades and some change after she first tried — and failed — to complete it at age 28. But she’ll need best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster) to act as her coach and project manager. Broaching the idea, she has a wild look in her eye. “You said I needed to do something to get out of my funk,” to which Bonnie replies: “I meant you should sign up for speed-dating. Or see a therapist.”

With little else to occupy her time — and repeatedly telling anyone who will listen that her last name means water nymph in Greek — Diana becomes consumed with the idea of finally achieving this goal. She’s living out her own version of “Moby-Dick,” with the Cuba-to-Florida quest — a beast of its own — taunting her all these years and making her as single-minded and destructive in her pursuit as Ahab versus the whale, with Bonnie as her Ishmael.

The training montage comes early. Too early (and too underwhelming) in terms of the story’s pacing but that’s because it will take Diana several attempts over the years before she succeeds in 2013 — fifth time’s the charm — at age 64. She makes incremental improvements each time, learning as she goes and eventually donning a wet suit and mask when swimming through jellyfish-infested waters. (Why she doesn’t wear a wet suit the entire time goes unexplained and remains a dangling question, since one of her concerns while training is just how cold she is.) The logistics are both simple — she eats by treading water next to the boat so that Bonnie can drop pasta into her mouth — and complicated, whether it’s the ocean’s shifting currents or other safety issues.

I would have liked more details from screenwriter Julia Cox, even of the cringey variety. How does Diana deal with emptying her bowels over a two-day journey while wearing a standard swimsuit, or does this bodily function pause while she’s burning through that many calories? How do they ensure she doesn’t fall asleep or pass out? What happens to human skin when it’s submersed in salt water for that long? The movie envisions what it might have been like when she starts to hallucinate, but otherwise her psychological state of mind is given short shrift. Diana creates a mental playlist to occupy her thoughts while swimming, but we get little sense of how that works or if she allows herself other thoughts.

Directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are primarily documentary filmmakers (notably for their 2018 Oscar-winning rock-climbing feature “Free Solo”) and are experienced with stories of people pushing themselves to the limit. But they struggle to adapt some of those skills to a scripted format, relying too heavily on archival footage, which gums up the film rather than deepens it. I wish they had put more trust in cinematographer Claudio Miranda’s gorgeous underwater photography.

Frequent flashbacks to Diana’s childhood offer some insights into her intense drive. But these scenes also suggest she would, in fact, benefit from therapy as Bonnie suggested, particularly around her fraught childhood relationship with her father, and separately, a sexually abusive coach. The film treats these twin memories like ghosts, both haunting her and motivating her to reach her goal. It’s a little too tidy.

There are endless practicalities that need to be attended to for this kind of masochistic project and Diana is supported by team of experts who she persuades to work for free, including a navigator (Rhys Ifans, mirroring Bening’s frazzled blond haircut), and her version of a rousing pre-swim speech is a wonder of narcissism: “You’ve all sacrificed a great deal — no money, no perks, no guarantees. But I can think of no worthier cause for such sacrifice: My life’s mission — dare I say my destiny!”

Bonnie finally calls her out about “all this me, me, me, me crap,” but the film doesn’t explore that any further. Perhaps massive self-involvement is a required personality trait for this sort of thing. I’m sure it helps. But maybe that premise is as reductive as the assumption that only miserable people make great art.

The Diana of the film has tunnel vision. That could be true, but the real Diana Nyad also seems interested in more than just herself. She wouldn’t have been a successful journalist otherwise and it’s curious that “Nyad” omits an interesting detail that would have revealed something about how she views her place in the world: A month after she made it from Cuba to Florida, she swam for 48 hours nonstop in an outdoor pool set up in midtown Manhattan as part of a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Sandy. She raised more than $100,000.

In an old interview, she’s asked how we can make our daily lives more adventurous. “There’s value to tuning in to what other people are doing and what their experiences are.” A stronger film would have found a way to capture that side of personality as well.

———

'NYAD'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some strong language and brief partial nudity)

Running time: 2:01

How to watch: On Netflix Friday

———