The identity of one of the most controversial films playing at this year’s London Film Festival may surprise you.
A film with an A-List cast led by a multiple-time Oscar winner and nominee and set to be released by Netflix later this year, the movie – reviewed below – is based on a real-life record-breaking American sports figure.
Nyad sees Annette Bening play swimmer Diana Nyad, who, with support from her best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll (portrayed by Jodie Foster), starts training at the age of 60 to finally attempt achieving her life-long dream: a 110-mile open ocean swim from Cuba to Florida.
It co-stars Rhys Ifans as Nyad’s chief navigator on her quest, John Bartlett, as well as Anna Harriette Pittman as the young version of Diana, Erica Cho, Luke Cosgrove, Eric T. Miller and Garland Scott.
Nyad is also the feature directorial debut of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who netted an Oscar for their 2018 climber documentary Free Solo. Given its performer pedigree and inspirational subject, it is thought to be one of the streaming platform’s top contenders for the 2024 Academy Awards.
But what is the fuss around the sports movie Nyad, and why is it causing controversy?
Who is Diana Nyad?
Diana Nyad, now 74, was born in New York City in 1949, and started training as a swimmer when she was at school, with hopes of making the 1968 Olympics.
After falling ill with heart inflammation, she headed to college where she refocused on long-distance events.
She first rose to prominence in 1975, when she swam around the island of Manhattan in seven hours and 57 minutes.
In 1979, Nyad set a record in distance swimming over open water – for men and women – by swimming 102 miles from Bimini in the Bahamas to Juno Beach, Florida in 27 hours and 30 minutes.
The year before, she had attempted to swim from Havana, Cuba to Key West in Florida in a steel shark cage, covering around 76 miles in just under 42 hours before she was removed from the water due to dangerous weather and sea conditions.
After retiring aged 30, and pursuing a career in sports broadcasting and writing, Nyad resumed swimming training again in early 2010 – a few months after her 60th birthday – to attempt to successfully complete the Cuba-to-Florida open water swim.
Why is the new Netflix film controversial?
The Netflix movie follows American Beauty and The Kids Are All Right star Bening as Nyad as she tries multiple times between 2011 and 2013 to become the first person to achieve the open water swim unaided.
Two people had undertaken the challenge before – 65-year-old Walter Poenisch in 1978 and 22-year-old Susie Maroney in 1997. Both used shark cages, which Nyad rejected, while Poenisch also used a snorkel and fins.
In her fifth overall attempt, Nyad finally made it to Key West on September 2, 2013, exhausted and swollen, where a crowd of people stood waiting to congratulate the athlete after almost 53 hours in the water.
However, shortly after her triumph at the age of 64, questions were raised over the authenticity of her claim.
Nyad, as is shown in the film, is known to be a somewhat divisive figure in the swimming community thanks to her ego and previous exaggerated swimming accomplishments in her career.
These include her claim that she finished sixth at the Olympic trials in 1968, broke a world record in 100-metre backstroke, and forgetting that six women before her had successfully swum around Manhattan, according to the LA Times.
‘Am I embarrassed to have inflated my own record when my record is pretty good on its own? Yes, it makes me cringe. Some of those statements are 45 years old–there wasn’t even an internet then.
‘But I’m human and I like to think that I’ve lived a life that now makes me proud of who I am,’ Nyad told the publication in response.
Regarding her completed Cuba-to-Florida swim, sceptics questioned her surge in speed hours in, and her ability to be able to make a short speech afterward, as well as the use of a specially designed protective suit and mask to guard against potentially deadly jellyfish stings, arguing it made the swim ‘assisted’.
Nyad told the New York Times just days after her swim: ‘I’m an absolutely above-board person who never cheated on anything in my whole life.
‘They have every right to ask all these questions, and we have every intention to honour the accurate information.’
Analysis of data made available later revealed that Nyad had benefited from a powerful current in her favour thanks to the Gulf Stream.
Her completed swim has not been ratified by any marathon swimming governing body, nor was it overseen by one, with the Guinness Book of World Records recently removing her record from its database when a World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) report flagged that.
WOWSA also urged the film’s viewers to ‘watch with discernment, keeping in mind the discrepancies surrounding the swim’.
Nyad has since said that she would accept ratification of her swim as assisted.
‘We didn’t want an asterisk next to the swim. But if anybody wants to ratify it now and stamp it assisted, we can accept it. Because we did it fair and square, no help in any way,’ she confirmed to the LA Times.
Director Vasarhelyi also told the paper that they brought their ‘most clear-eyed, stringent, ethical nonfiction backgrounds’ to look at all of the questions surrounding Nyad’s swim.
‘Our film is not about a record. Our film is not about how many times someone was touched. It’s about how a woman woke up at 60 and realised she wasn’t finished, even though the world may be finished with her,’ she added.
The filmmaker also suggested in a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter that ‘if we were dealing with a man, people wouldn’t be picking on him quite as much’.
‘But Diana acknowledges her shortcomings and I respect that,’ she stated.
Nyad review
By Tori Brazier
From the film’s simple real-life premise – outspoken female athlete makes shock comeback in her 60s to achieve success that alluded her over 30 years before – it’s clear that Nyad is vying for awards attention.
It’s the kind of fairytale story that’s almost too good to be true (which some sceptics argue it is), but Hollywood and audiences have always loved this kind of fare.
Annette Bening plays controversial swimmer Diana Nyad, with Jodie Foster as her close friend Bonnie Stoll, who she convinces to coach her through the gruelling challenge of making an unassisted swim for Cuba to Floria. That’s a 110-mile journey which would take up to approximately 60 hours of open water swimming.
Based on Nyad’s 2015 memoir Find a Way, Julia Cox has crafted a decently paced and satisfying narrative around the stop-start frustrations that saw the marathon swimmer take four attempts between 2011 and 2013 at her goal.
Putting quibbles of legitimacy aside for now, it’s cheering to see a movie focused on later middle-aged women pursuing something that everyone dismisses as preposterous simply due to their age; it makes the pay-off all the sweeter.
Although the controversy around Nyad’s swim is not acknowledged by the film, the best decision it does make is to recognise the sportswoman’s divisive personality.
She’s known to have inflated past career achievements and has a healthy ego that’s rarely kept in check – the movie makes sure to reference this in more than one exasperated exchange between Nyad and Stoll over her ‘exaggerations’.
It also gives a wonderfully flawed character for Bening to fully submerge herself in, giving an excellent warts-and-all performance in a role for which she reportedly trained for over a year.
However, Foster’s warm and supportive turn as Stoll might just edge her out as the film’s best, balancing the audience’s sympathies perfectly as perhaps the figure you most want to see succeed.
The two actresses also share a superbly convincing chemistry as friends of decades’ standing, which pulls the movie up into a higher echelon of effectiveness.
Rhys Ifans’ underplayed performance as quietly brilliant but grumpy navigator John Bartlett also has charm and provides another helpful obstacle for Bening’s Nyad to come up against.
Nyad is intercut with real interview footage and commentary from the swimmer across the years, providing helpful context and building a sense of destiny.
However, it’s a type of underdog sports film that’s been done time and again, which perhaps missed an interesting trick in rejecting the chance to address any of the scepticism around Nyad’s claim of making an unassisted swim.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first movie to take a broad-brush approach to nuance depriving of it a tidy happy ending though.
Both Bening and Foster’s acting is certainly commendable in the film, but could their nomination potential be sunk by the doubts come awards season?
3.5/5
Metro.co.uk contacted reps for the Netflix film and Diana Nyad for comment.
Nyad will release in select cinemas on October 20, before streaming exclusively on Netflix from November 3.
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