Why Diana Nyad is boring and why it doesn't matter

On the joys of ordinary heroines

What a sneaky film Nyad is. It’s ostensibly about Diana Nyad, who swam the 110 miles from Cuba to Key West at age 63, and without a shark cage. Obviously this is, you know, impressive. Obviously it’s nice that stories of female athletic feats are being told onscreen, and that this film celebrates the kind of blunt, self-aggrandizing, prickly woman who once would have been deemed too “unlikable” to be the protagonist of a movie. Diana’s kind of a dick, and the movie casually allows her to be a dick in a way I found quite refreshing.

The thing is, she’s also kind of boring, for reasons inherent in the story, not Annette Bening’s performance. Nyad is monomaniacal, which I suppose you’d have to be to pull off a feat like this, but it makes her a bit one-note. We learn very little about her that isn’t directly tied to her swim. We know she loves Mary Oliver, because of the law that requires any female movie character with a late-in-life ambition to recite that damn poem about their one wild and precious life.¹ We know that as a teen swimmer she was sexually abused by her coach; it is presented as her ultimate Why, because in both our cinema and our culture, we like it when even a woman’s most independent acts somehow tie back to a man, any man. (I’m glad we tell stories about women getting back at cruel men, and I also long for the day we get to do things for reasons not born of our own subjugation and abuse. When we can decide to swim 110 miles Just Because.) And we know her last name means “water nymph” in Greek, because she repeatedly cites that fact as justification for her quest.² That’s about all we get of Nyad the person, and maybe asking to know her as one is asking too much of efficient commercial storytelling. Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have a longstanding interest in documenting extreme athleticism; this is a film of the body.

Though even in the bodily realm, Nyad misses opportunities to make Diana tangible and real. At the start of the film, she is a retired competitive swimmer who hasn’t seriously trained in decades. When she tells her best friend Bonnie that she’s decided to attempt the Cuba-Florida swim, she says “I’ve already worked back up to three-hour pool sessions.” I almost sighed with longing at that line, because I’m guessing that going from decades of no swimming to three-hour swims at the age of sixty involved some drama, bodily and psychologically, and we didn’t get to witness it. Sure, seeing her confront box jellyfish is momentarily exciting, but it doesn’t reveal character in the way those early, secret training sessions would have. Were they fun? Did she want to give up? Who knows? The movie is more concerned with breaking the shocking news that jellyfish stings hurt.

So yes, Diana Nyad is boring. And so it’s a good thing that Nyad isn’t really about her, but about Bonnie, the aforementioned friend, played by Jodie Foster in a performance that makes the absolute most of being a normal fucking person. Bonnie is a swim coach—she’s Nyad’s coach—and as such, she’s accustomed to extreme circumstances, the pain cave, the lengths an athlete will go to to shave two-tenths of a second off her time.

It’s just that Bonnie’s scope doesn’t include the real possibility of death. She doesn’t think it’s fine to wreck other people’s lives in pursuit of an athletic goal. But Nyad does—whether consciously or not—and the film is a study of what it’s like to be sucked into that vortex. To volunteer for it, and second-guess yourself, and maybe even pull out at times only to walk back in. Foster has rarely been better. She makes normalcy and relatability fascinating. (She also stands in for the audience when she sighs “Not this again” the third time Mary Oliver comes up.)

And watching her, it struck me how rarely we get to see our great actors play just people. They’re always doing so much acting! They’re suffering intensely. They’re transforming their bodies. They’re aggressively de-glamming themselves. (Annette Bening does all three here.) Even when they’re cast as ostensibly just-folks, it tends to be in a mythical, archetypal way, a la Charlize Theron in North Country. It would be too easy for viewers to accept Theron as an accountant or office manager, someone who works at a desk. Only attempting to pass as a miner involves enough capital-A Acting.

The star of NYAD, and also Annette Bening.

I think I might be tired of Acting. Seeing Foster as the sane woman around the drama gave me the same rush I had watching Meryl Streep as an upper-middle-class New Yorker in The Hours. As you probably know, The Hours is a triptych. Over here we have Nicole Kidman, a suicidal Virginia Woolf. And over here is Julianne Moore, a suicidal 50s housewife. And then here’s Meryl, just having a day. She buys flowers for a party. She visits a sick and bitter old friend. She chats with her wife. She responds reasonably and understandably to surprises. I love The Hours, but during the other storylines, I sometimes found myself wishing we could check in on Meryl again. Maybe she was making a phone call, or having leftovers for lunch. I really needed to know. Late in the day, something shocking and movie-ish does happen to the Streep character, and because we have come to know her so well, it hits with extraordinary force. Late in Nyad, Bonnie finds herself in the position of urging a badly hallucinating Nyad—“I didn’t expect to see the Taj Mahal!” she says cheerily from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—to keep swimming, and we know what that means because we’ve seen what it took for such a nice, reasonable woman to drink the Kool-Aid.

Ultimately, this seemingly conventional sports drama gives us something fairly novel for a sports film: a look at the price that greatness exacts from the normal people in the great one’s life. And here’s the key element: it does so without turning Bonnie into a passive hand-wringer like scores of movie women before her. Bonnie isn’t the stoically suffering wife of A Beautiful Mind or The Danish Girl, or the quietly seething one of Maestro.³ ⁴Bonnie is in it. She’s on the boat. She’s in the drink. She’s making things happen. Because that’s what movie heroes do.

1. Mary Oliver was a great poet and it’s not her fault that she’s been turned into a Live, Laugh, Love pillow.

2. I guess the world is lucky it doesn’t mean “serial killer.”

3. Yes, I’m aware of the narrative that Maestro is really all about Felicia Montenegro, not Leonard Bernstein. If that’s true, then answer me this: why didn’t Bradley Cooper bother writing some scenes for her? There is one scene in Maestro where we hear from Felicia about the compromises she made, why she made them, and how she feels about them in retrospect. One. Otherwise, we are left to watch her stony face and guess.

4. Claire Foy in First Man is an exception to the dull and frustrating population of quietly seething wives, because the movie is actually interested in Janet Armstrong and her anger, something I found more memorable than its justly praised moon-landing scene.