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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 2, 2023

Nyad is the narrative feature debut of documentary filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. It's common to the point of cliché to note that a dramatization of a real-life story might have been better served by documentary about the same material, but here, the directors almost seem to be courting that opinion about their movie.

After all, the filmmakers have plenty of archival footage with which to work. We know this, because the movie is filled with it—serving as flashbacks to the main character's past, an explanation for her current obsession, and some final notes just before and during the closing credits to make certain we know this is indeed based on a true story.

One understands Chin and Vasarshelyi's impulse to include as much actual footage as there is in this narrative. There's comfort in doing what you know and do well, and there's little denying that the married team of filmmakers is skilled at making documentaries about true-to-life stories of inspiration, often revolving around sports. What's so different about this particular story to warrant such a shift in style and purpose?

That's difficult to tell from the end result, except, perhaps, that the directors are the primary reason this material comes across as even slightly intriguing on the levels of narrative and form. The screenplay by Julia Cox basically hits a bunch of conventions of both a biographical movie and one about an inspiring tale in the world of sports. Without Chin and Vasarshelyi including so much video evidence of the real subject—the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad—in this movie, maybe the material would have come across as even thinner and more predictable.

At the start, we're offered a bit of back story, which is broadly and/or vaguely expanded upon through those archival and some dramatized flashbacks, about Diana (Annette Bening). Her surname comes from a Greek water nymph—a fact repeated to her in childhood by her father. At an early age, she became convinced that swimming was her destiny.

After multiple swims in open water around the world, she attempted her most grueling and dangerous endeavor: swimming more than 100 miles for more than two days, through shark-infested waters, from Cuba to Florida. At the age of 28, she made her first try, and it was a near disaster.

Thirty-two years later, Diana turns 60, has a party thrown for her by her former lover and best friend Bonnie Still (Jodie Foster), and realizes she wants to try the Cuba-to-Florida swim again. It would have been a challenge at her physical peak, but now, no one believes such a swim could be possible. That only makes her more confident that she has to accomplish it.

The rest of the story amounts to three different modes, and each of them quickly becomes repetitive, flimsy, or both. One is the actual procedure of such an attempt, with Diana training for hours upon hours every day, raising the money from a small number of possible sponsors, and hiring various experts in coaching (Bonnie) and the Gulf Stream (Rhys Ifans' Florida-based boat captain John Barlett) and potentially dangerous marine life. The technical and experimental angles of this portion of the story are the most obviously engaging, since a lot of it comes down to trial and error—tried under extreme circumstances and in which a single error could be fatal.

Another is a study of Diana's character, which, as presented under these specific circumstances, isn't much. She's egocentric, demanding, more or less oblivious to the thoughts and feelings of others, and so determined to achieve this decades-long goal that she's willing to die trying.

Bening is appropriately fiery in the role, but Diana is such a one-note figure that the performance starts to feel like a caricature. Far more convincing are Foster, as the infinitely patient Bonnie, and Ifans, whose no-nonsense pragmatism often clashes with Diana's plain and obsessive idealism. After a bit, one starts to wonder what a story seen from the perspective of these characters, with Diana's stubbornness serving as a challenge as tough to navigate as these waters, might have looked like.

The final piece consists of those flashbacks, which combine news reports and interviews with dramatic re-creations of Diana's difficult and traumatic childhood. It helps us to see Diana as a real person, of course, and to understand how she became this type of dogged, unstoppable force, but the staged flashbacks play out more as a mystery than actual back story. By the time the movie reveals abuse that still haunts her in her darkest and loneliest moments, the screenplay, which features multiple scenes of a similar bent, has Diana explaining all of it to the audience in a lengthy monologue.

Those scenes in the water, as Diana makes several attempts to accomplish her goal, are harrowing, apart from some flourishes of hallucinations brought about by physical and mental exhaustion. We know there's at least some actual footage of at least one of those attempts, because Nyad shows it to us. It's appreciated here, to be sure, but how much more effective might this story have been if the filmmakers simply embraced the real deal?

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