The 2024 Academy Awards are already being criticized for their schedule. Lots of fans and critics are complaining that by the time the statuettes are handed-out on March 10, the movie conversation will have completely moved-on from 2023. They have a point, but this bloated awards season is also giving everyone a chance to catch up on overlooked films and surprising new conversations that have only recently come to light.
Before the Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 23, nobody was talking about Nyad. But, when Annette Bening was nominated for Best Actress in a movie about a senior citizen swimmer, it shocked Barbie fans who were already reeling after Margot Robbie didn’t get a nomination as the title character of a movie that earned over a billion dollars. Jodie Foster also got nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Nyad, and suddenly everybody’s talking about “that swimming movie.”
Nyad is a biopic focused on long-distance-swimmer Diana Nyad’s attempts to swim from Cuba to Miami beginning at the age of 60 years old. Nyad became a public figure when she swam around Manhattan Island in 1975, and when she swam from Bimini, The Bahamas to Juno Beach, Florida in 1979. Nyad first tried to swim from Cuba to Miami in 1978. I can remember being a little kid in Detroit and listening to the radio when the shark cage Nyad was swimming in had been blown too far off course for the swim to continue. Nyad had been in the water for 42 hours before her team dragged her out. She was covered in jellyfish stings and unable to stand without assistance. That was the first time I’d heard the name Portuguese man o’ war. I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t want to know.
After a life of overachieving, Diana Nyad decided she had to take one more shot at the Cuba swim in 2010. She’d started swimming in the seventh grade shortly after her mother was married to Diana’s stepfather who gave Nyad her mythic name. A “naiad” is a water nymph in Greek mythology, and if it feels like Nyad’s life in the swimming is a matter of fate, nobody believes that more than she does. Nyad is obviously a world class athlete of exceptional physical capacities, but her superpowers are a tireless pain threshold (critics have compared Nyad’s tortured physicality to The Passion of the Christ) and a sometimes dangerously delusional level of self-belief.
The reason why Bening is nominated for an Academy Award is because she manages to make the often unlikable Nyad completely compelling. Viewers get swept-up in her crazy confidence and stubborn insistence that the rules of time and physics somehow don’t apply to her and her obvious destiny to do things that normal people would never consider. Bening carries the film from scene to scene, from swim to swim. She’s tortured one minute and hilarious the next. And when you watch the effortless chemistry she has with Foster the movie turns into a screen acting masterclass. Foster plays Bonnie, Nyad’s longtime friend and trainer, and the pair manage to fill-in the blanks of a decades-long career and personal relationship with every easy smile, eye roll, hurtful admission and tough love pep talk.
Nyad tries to shoehorn the swimmer’s experiences of overcoming sexual assault, but that part of the story feels out of place and even trivialized in a movie that’s paradoxically at its best as something I can only describe as Rocky with grandmas. Nyad is a deeply stirring sports film brimming with guts and pain. And the fact that Diana Nyad’s story is true only makes it seem more unbelievable, more like a myth, like a legend.
Nyad is streaming on Netflix
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.