'NYAD' Is as Flimsy as a "Hang In There" Motivational Poster

There's something wonderfully pointless about swimming from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. On the one hand, it's an incredible feat of endurance — a 177 km swim that takes more than two full days of continuous swimming to complete; on the other, who cares? It's not like anyone was asking for someone to complete this fairly inane act of fortitude.

And that's the beauty of it: why swim across the vast oceanic channel between the two land masses? Because it's there. Co-director Jimmy Chin previously directed the rope-less rock climbing doc Free Solo (2018), which chronicled a similarly absurd accomplishment.

Marathon swimmer Diana Nyad was 64 when she became the first person to complete the swim in 2013, having failed when attempting it 35 years earlier. Netflix's NYAD captures some of the gruesome toll the swim takes on the body and mind — but too often gets bogged down in mundane inspirational sloganeering, like a "hang in there" poster thumbtacked to an office cubicle.

Annette Bening plays Nyad, and she so closely resembles the swimmer that it's sometimes difficult to tell Bening apart from the actual archival footage of Nyad. Having recently turned 60 and worrying that her best years are behind her, she decides rekindle her swimming dream, convincing her no-nonsense best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster, exuding a brusque warmth that steals the film) to be her coach. 

As Nyad trains for the swim and makes several failed attempts throughout her early 60s, the film's best moments embrace the gnarly elements of both the physical feat and the subject's personality. Nyad's lips and eyes swell after so long in the water, making her look like some sort of an alien puffer fish; moments when she's gulping in mouthfuls of seawater, applying ointment to the raw sunburns on the back on her neck or vomiting repeatedly add a necessary grit. Nyad's sense of ego-driven entitlement, which causes her to alienate members of her team, brings some complexity to her character.

For the most part, however, Chin and co-director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi gloss over these unpleasant elements in favour of feel-good vapidity, with repeated recitations of the Mary Oliver quote, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Flashback sequences are done with an extremely on-the-nose sepia tone, and Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat delivers a wretched Chariots of Fire knockoff score that resembles the royalty-free soundtrack of a corporate training video.

NYAD is a bland but perfectly entertaining motivational sports flick. It's not until the final credits, featuring footage of Diana Nyad making media appearances, that the film's real shortcoming is revealed: it quickly becomes clear that the actual woman is far funnier, stranger and more distinctive than Bening's depiction, as the real Nyad shares an anecdote about waking her neighbours up at the crack of dawn with the fanfare of her bugle. Isn't Hollywood supposed make real people seem more interesting and outrageous, not less?