Nyad - Review Thread

Nyad is the scripted feature debut of the filmmaking team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who got famous making documentaries about mountaineers (most notably Free Solo, about the free-climber Alex Honnold) and then expanded to making documentaries about other difficult feats and adventures like The Rescue, which focused on the rescue of the kids from the Thai cave. With their most recent film Nyad they’ve left behind the documentary format in favor of a scripted film, but are still telling a true story of a person trying to do an outlandish athletic feat. The film looks at Diana Nyad, played here by Annette Bening, an endurance swimmer known for swimming extremely long distances in the open ocean and gained a degree of celebrity in the 1970s for doing so. The film picks up years after that when Nyad decided to come out of retirement in her 60s to attempt a swim she’d failed at in the past: going all the way from Havana to Key West without any physical assistance. The film chronicles here attempts to achieve this and also goes into the various logistics involved in such an attempt like what they need to do to deal with obstacles like sharks and jellyfish and how to feed a person in the water without physically interfering. You can kind of see the same instincts here that you would in Vasarhelyi and Chin’s documentaries with its focus on procedure and on the stubborn personality type required to do something like this. I suspect that had there been more video footage of Nyad’s swim they would have just turned this into another doc and I might have preferred that, but this isn’t a bad delivery method for the story either and Benning and Jodie Foster give pretty good performances. I don’t think this movie will prove wildly memorable to me but it worked well enough while I watched it.