There are plenty of moments in the utterly woeful Nyad that its status as ‘a drama made by documentarians’ makes itself evident in the worst way possible, but none so damning as its closing scene. This true story of Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening in yet another of her recent misfire performances) and her attempts, in her early 60s, to be the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida is inevitably building up to her grand triumph, but as this climax approaches, directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin refuse to let it just play out, instead cutting to real footage of the event. It’s a moment that betrays their complete (and, as it turns out, well-founded) lack of faith in their own film, one that attempts to be inspiring but is itself so uninspired as to border on infuriating.
The swim was an almost-superhuman endurance feat, but there really is nothing to this story beyond that – we just watch as Nyad (a name, as the film reminds you about five separate times, that references the water nymphs of Greek myth) makes her four attempts at it between 2011 and 2013, facing setbacks of, mostly, storms and jellyfish. It’s a tale of mad ambition, but neither the script from Julia Cox nor Bening’s bug-eyed and one-note performance bring this to life, instead delivering us a generically ‘no bullshit’ woman who is seemingly built exclusively out of weak laugh lines and tough love aphorisms.
Just like the writing, the filmmaking takes every chance it can get to make the boring choice. Flat lighting, dull cinematography, and hilariously misguided hallucination sequences render Nyad a chore to even look at, while the raw power of the ocean, which should be the simplest and most vital thing to get right in a story like this, barely registers. There’s no weight to the swimming itself, even as we’re told that Nyad’s feats are Herculean, and shabby CGI means the threat of a shark attack is laughably rendered.
No one, from Bening to Jodie Foster as Nyad’s best friend and coach Bonnie to Rhys Ifans (entirely unconvincing) as salty expert navigator John Bartlett, gets to talk like a person – this is dialogue written under the assumption that the audience won’t really listen to it, constantly re-explaining plot points in the most painfully drawn-out ways. It’s here that the ‘Netflix Original’ of it all starts to make sense and though Netflix are giving Nyad a two-week cinematic grace period before it lands on streaming, there’s no convincing reason to pay to watch this on a big screen.
From Rules Don’t Apply to Life Itself to Hope Gap over the last few years, Bening has, tragically, become a real red flag actor – her presence signaling more than perhaps any other actor that the film you’re about to watch could well be a one-star stinker (she even has the already much-hated Poolman still to come out this year). And, yep, here we are again with Nyad, which is about as one-star stinker as things get, a completely pointless retelling of a life story that doesn’t seem to share the passions of its subject at all.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 