*/****
starring Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Rhys Ifans, Johnny Solo
screenplay by Julia Cox, based on the book by Diana Nyad
directed by Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
by Walter Chaw Film festivals are expensive and not profitable. They underpay their staff, which mostly comprises volunteers and a nomadic group of technicians who follow festivals around the country like roadies on an eternal tour, and they suffer from the need to please their wealthiest supporters, who, for the most part, have more money than taste. Certainly, they have more desire to be coddled than hunger for risk-taking. That’s why, every year at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the country, there’s an entry like thrill-seeker documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyl’s Oscar-bait biopic Nyad. Last year it was Empire of Light, and the year before it was King Richard, and the year before that it was Judy. In 2017, there was that Battle of the Sexes thing about Billie Jean King, the only one I’ve mentioned to get zero traction at the Academy Awards. Each of these movies is as functionally formulaic as a suppository: machine-tooled and well-lubed, with only one measure for its success or failure. It either wins the middlebrow’s greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn’t know how to begin to answer that question. Is a suppository good? I dunno, man, I don’t spend much time thinking about a capsule I shoot out of my ass annually around this time of year.
There’s something deeply wrong and off-putting about distance-swimmer Diane Nyad (Annette Bening). She’s a narcissist somewhere well into the disordered part of “the spectrum” who decides, at the age of 60, that she would like to swim from Cuba to Florida and so enlists her best friend and former lover Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster) to be her coach and enabler. They mortgage their houses, assemble a team that includes crusty boat captain/navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), and fall prey to a stunning amount of brown-tinted flashbacks to Nyad’s troubled and abusive childhood, which has led her to think the only way she can look at herself as fully-formed is by fulfilling her “destiny.” If we compare the messages of these midcult, awards-season darlings, they seem to largely revolve around the idea that elite athletes share the same nightmarish mono-parent–suburban Von Stroheims with riding crops and jodhpurs, screaming their plans for their offspring through hellish training regimens that sub for loving childhoods. What’s disturbing is that through the agency of this glad-handing garbage, the villains of life are validated by the inhuman, occasionally fatal accomplishments of their sad, shattered kids. Raise a glass: You killed your baby and replaced it with a clockwork changeling with a broken heart.
Nyad swims, entirely fails at social interactions, and generally works overtime at getting Bening that long-awaited Oscar (fifth time’s the charm). There’s the part where she has to apologize for being terrible, the part where the big event is in jeopardy, and then the triumphant thing itself that you know is going to happen this time because although the film already feels twice as long as it possibly could be, you can still tell when these things are going to finally put us out of our misery. There’s NPR humour in it (Nyad knows its target audience), there’s a score that’s basically the Thomas Kinkade version of music, all lilting and strings-heavy, and there are pictures of the real people involved at the end because if there weren’t, a good percentage of the folks watching this voluntarily would sit in the dark waiting for them until the next show started. Lives are at stake here! That’s probably why movies like this never deviate far or long from formula. I don’t even hate Nyad; I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I have no feelings about its pushing of abuse and dysfunction as feminism, no reaction to a bit of entertainment designed exclusively to catch the attention of geriatric showbiz professionals who will prick up their ears when Crosby, Stills & Nash pops onto the soundtrack and then tick those little boxes next to the big categories. Will this one have legs? Probably not. But it’s trying pretty hard to be completely mediocre and forgettable anyway. Stroke, stroke, stroke, amiright?
