I keep thinking about the movie Nyad (Netflix). I watched it the other night and loved it and cried pretty much the whole way through, not because it’s a sad movie or great movie but because it went into me in the incalculable way films can. Commercials can do that. A video of a man playing a genius improv on the piano to the accompaniment of his cat scratching at something in a percussive rhythm can do that. Whatever makes the world seem more a place you want to live in, I don’t question.
The morning after seeing Nyad, I banged out a column for my stack. It was first thoughts, and over the next few days I added this thought and that one to the conversation on social media. I love developing work this way. Other people’s comments become prompts, and I could see pockets of interest that were akin to mine and others that were not akin to mine.
For example, I don’t really care that the two leads, Annette Bening as marathon swimmer Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster as Nyad’s coach and close friend Bonnie Stoll, are both in their 60s, playing characters in their 60s without any of the cosmetic whatevers that usually fluff the appearance of movie stars. I don’t care because I don’t have a brief for anyone looking a way that relaxes the anxieties of other people. I don’t have a brief for what is called “the natural.” I don’t have a brief for a right kind of aging—especially for women!—and a kind of aging you are expected to burn in hell for.
I do like the fact it’s a movie about lesbians who were an item 30 years ago and now are friends. I do like the fact it’s a movie about women, in which men don’t grab the reins of the story and drive off with it. The fact I’m saying this shows how rare it is, and it’s glorious to see. It’s part of the reason I kept crying with a mixture of joy and other emotions I’ll try to sort out.
Some people see the movie as a triumph of the will, you should excuse the expression, kind of deal, with a woman athlete, benched for 30 years, deciding at age 60 to resurrect her ambition to swim from Havana to Key West, a distance of over 110 miles through water thronged with sharks and killer jellyfish, a feat requiring she swim continually for over 53 hours. After four failed attempts, Nyad pulls it off at age 64.
Bening as Nyad pleads the case for a fifth swim by saying to Bonnie, “The world wants me to shut my mouth and sit down and wait to die.” She's right. The world does want her to do that, and she feels the imperative "to shut up and die" so strongly because she's an athlete and athletes, especially female athletes, get the speeded up version of what all women get when they cease using tampons. (Yes, men get this shit, too, but you may have noticed, the rest of the world can have my portion of talking about men as a hard-luck group.)
So yes, Diana, you’re right about the age thing. And good for you, honey, honestly, for pulling off a feat of persistence so over the top it achieves a kind of brilliance. My friend, the performance artist Holly Hughes, compares Nyad to artists of endurance and extreme public pain such as Marina Abramović, Chris Burden, and Stelarc. Nyad doesn’t see herself as an artist. She claims to have “a destiny” to fulfill. What kinds of people believe they have a "destiny"? Not a great list of contenders. Hitler and Mussolini, table for two?
Nyad also sees herself as a whip to the rest of us dead things. As soon as she reaches dry land, she’s ready with the spiel about Never surrender your dreams, and Age isn’t an obstacle to whatever. To me, all of these people would be less annoying if they didn’t pitch their stunts as symbolic, or inspirational, or meaning-filled and instead said, simply, “I want to do this. I think it could be cool. Wanna watch?”
When Nyad makes a case for her swim as “look, I’m not dead yet, and I can prove it,” she is actually making the opposite point. We humans over 60 shouldn't have to prove anything in order to be spared the "shut up and die" sneer and eye roll.
The movie works because it doesn’t see Nyad the way she sees herself. It doesn’t ask us to love her. It asks us to look at someone who is determinedly self-promoting and unlovable. And it asks us to look at the aliveness she kicks up around her, anyway. Asshat though she is, she kicks up aliveness.
The Diana we’re shown doesn’t know why she does what she does, and she doesn’t need to. Starting at 14, she was repeatedly raped by her swimming coach, Jack Nelson, as were her team-mates, and this experience is always in her head, as the film’s directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, brilliantly show, splicing in fragments of Diana’s memories as she methodically strokes along and sings to herself to keep going. Splicing in memories but not reducing her to a clinical case or solving the mystery of temperament with this thing caused that mood.
Nyad is a shark from beginning to end, an engine of self, burning away. Imagine playing a shark who learns nothing about herself or other people in the course of her experience. For Bening, its the acting equivalent of swimming from Havana to Key West, and she pulls it off so well we never come to care about Nyad, not really. It’s the great feat of misdirection the film achieves. The reason I cried for two hours is because of everyone else in the movie who are not sharks and who show you how to be a human being. They are gorgeous, starting with Bonnie, played with the perfect amount of underplaying by Jodie Foster, who agrees to coach Diana through the swims.
Coach is a word with almost no meaning in the context of this relationship. Bonnie keeps Diana alive through every moment she’s in the water, feeding her, guiding her through hallucinations, capturing all the other players she will need to build a team, including shark wranglers, who’ve devised an electronic shield that turns away the fish, and including the team’s boat captain John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), who overturns his life to join this adventure.
I keep thinking about Nyad because it makes me think about relationships that require vast adjustments. If we make them, what do we think as we live them and look back at them? Who is a person that looks like a plane you want to jump onto, risks tossed to the wind? Who makes you feel alive? Who, when you're with them, you like yourself? What are we talking about when we talk about love?
Nyad is so in her own world, she thinks the others are sacrificing themselves for her and that she deserves their devotion. What we see, instead, are people looking for a group you need in order to make, collectively, a thing of beauty. They’re looking for the sense of belonging that only a group, cooperating and united, can produce. A joy brilliantly expressed, for example, in Day for Night, Truffaut’s love letter to the swoon of making movies with a team. Nyad is the excuse the others need to come together and find each other. She’s their instrument, not the other way around.
I love the way the movie reminded me of the many ways there are to love aliveness and the beauty of other people. Do we need a Nyad to call us to the airport and keep us flying? Well yes, sometimes, if they can do something no one else can do. Between the fourth and fifth attempts at the swim, Bonnie pulls out. She’s broke. She’s mortgaged her house to help with expenses. Nyad remains a dunce of need and ingratitude. When Bonnie returns to help her with her fifth swim, she says, “You’re my person. We’ve been each other’s person for more than 30 years. If you die, I want my face to be the last thing you see.” Quickly, she adds, “I hope you don’t die.” Ambivalence that can’t be resolved is also a form of beauty.
"Who is a person that looks like a plane you want to jump onto, risks tossed to the wind? Who makes you feel alive? Who, when you're with them, you like yourself?" Laurie, there are no more essential questions than these, posed here. Answer these and no more questions are necessary. But I loved every word of your movie review. I'm a long distance swimmer, and much older than the characters in Nyad. Thank you for a great gift. Margaret Mandell
🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻What a glorious thing to wake up to!! I have seen this movie twice already, and you made me love it even more!! I know the screenwriter — she was one of the assistants season five when I worked on the show Parenthood — and I recently got to interview her for a Writers Guild Q&A. The directors are a husband and wife team who made the brilliant documentary Free Solo — and from what I can tell, writer, directors, and actors were a joyful team themselves as they made this movie!