Review: Where Will You Swim With Your One Wild and Precious Life?
Thinking about Jodie Foster’s biceps in ‘NYAD’
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰½
Romance:
Sex:
Storytelling: ✰✰✰ ½
Performance: ✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰ ½
We may not be able to swim from Cuba to Key West. But if you pledged a paid subscription, we just might be brave enough to try <3
Some spoilers in these waters.
Written by Meg Steinfeld-Heim
Are you like me? Are you gay (90% art, 10% sports)? Maybe you also have a family (90% sports, 10% gay or otherwise) like mine? Yeah? Well, may I highly recommend NYAD as a group watch this holiday season. I effectively roped in not one, not two, but three sports-loving family members into this living room screening. I swear, those football freaks will do anything for a sports biopic (hi, Mom!).
Netflix’s NYAD, co-directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, is based on the real life story of Diana Nyad, an internationally recognized champion marathon and endurance swimmer. Nyad first gained national attention in 1975 when she swam around the island of Manhattan, breaking a 45-year-old record for circling the island (28 miles) in 7 hours and 57 minutes. In 1979, on her 30th birthday and the eve of her endurance swimming retirement, she then set a world record for distance swimming when she swam from North Bimini in the Bahamas to Juno Beach, Florida (102 miles) without the use of a protective shark cage in 27 ½ hours.
But there was always one big dream—and one equally big failure—that loomed over Diana: an unbroken, unassisted swim from Cuba to Key West, Florida. The feat would require 103 miles and over 60 hours of open water swimming. At 28, Nyad first attempted the swim. Inside a steel shark cage, she swam for nearly 42 hours, before her team of doctors removed her due to exhaustion from swimming against extremely strong winds and 8-foot swells that were slamming her against the cage and pushing her off course.
Early in the movie, we learn that Diana (portrayed impeccably by Annette Benning) is an insufferable, 60 year old lesbian! She talks about herself ad nauseam when set up with beautiful, single women. She moans to her best friend, Bonnie, about not wanting a birthday party—until it is revealed that a surprise one was thrown for her (she did actually want one). She scoffs at a book of Mary Oliver’s poetry that she found amongst her dead mom’s things. “Listen to this: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ See, I just don’t go in for poetry. Why not just say what they mean?” But the precedent is set: Diana has more to do with her wild, precious, long-distance-loving life.
More than 30 years after her self-imposed retirement, Nyad gets back in the pool. She quickly realizes that, despite her age, she has to attempt this monumental swim, again. Flashbacks to her childhood, where her stepfather explains to her that her (new) last name, Nyad, actually means water nymph in Greek are intercut with her at 60, returning to the lap pool in 2011. It is clear that Nyad has always believed that this is her destiny. She attempts to cajole her best friend and former national racquetball champion, Bonnie Stoll (JODIE FOSTER!!) to be her coach and companion in the attempt to pull off the Cuba to Key West swim. “I don’t believe in imposed limitations,” she says over a game of table tennis with Bonnie. Insufferable or not, this is a mindset that will eventually sweep Diana Nyad on a current of success.
Jodie is giving absolutely everything you’d want a late 50s, retired-sports-dyke-turned-marathon-swim-coach-in-2011 to give. Her biceps are absolute heaven. Her forearms deserve a Golden Globe. Her jawline rivals Jessica Chastain’s. She is 25% sunglasses from the Dicks Sporting Goods golf section, 25% tank tops, 25% bandanas as headbands, and 25% knee-length board shorts. Bonnie comes on as Diana’s coach and the two incredible women tackle all the watery obstacles: a navigator and weather expert, boat crew, ocean-savvy medics, and a shark management plan that will allow her to complete the swim totally “unassisted”, i.e. without a protective shark cage. As my mom sat down to watch, she asked me if Bonnie and Diana were “a thing”. I replied that no, they were just best friends and felt like I was putting myself back in the closet.
Foster and Benning play against each other so perfectly in this movie—it is remarkably transparent why the two are best friends and worked so well together in this way. Where Diana is fiery, irritable, confident and strong-willed, Bonnie is logical, relaxed, and reasonable. When I was rolling my eyes at Benning’s perfect portrayal of a big-headed athlete, I was swooning over Jodie’s performance of a best friend who could not be bothered to take her self-important bestie seriously.
Here is where the movie butts up against a small issue: marathon, open water swimming is pretty…repetitive. There is only so much you can add into a movie to make 6-60 hour stretches of swimming interesting. But the movie isn’t boring! It takes some liberties to dramatize and sprinkle in some visual interest that may or may not have happened, including narrowly-avoided shark attacks and rainbow underwater firework hallucinations.
In her autobiography, Nyad disclosed that her Olympian and Hall of Fame coach Jack Nelson, molested her and many other girls, beginning when she was 14 and continued until she graduated high school. This is incorporated via dissociative flashbacks that Diana experiences while swimming 24+ hours straight at a time. In fact, an analysis of Nyad’s ability to dissociate was included in the 2008 book, Sporting Lives: Metaphor and Myth in American Sports Autobiographies by James W. Pipkin. It seems like, while definitely not a healing-centric life practice, it may have helped her persevere through these incredibly challenging swims.
The fact that Nyad was actually, miraculously able to achieve this unprecedented 103 mile swim in her 60s when she failed to do so in her late 20s is fairly common knowledge—but what I learned had more to do with the sheer vastness of preparation for in-water obstacles that she took on. Nyad also details her 3 separate attempts from 2011-2012 before her fifth and final, when she completed the swim in 2013 at age 63. It’s a really uplifting and engaging watch, and I learned a lot about jellyfish protection!
After a passionate hug between Bonnie and Diana at a time of great adversity, my mom chimed in again: “It seems like they ARE a thing”. For curious minds, Diana discloses towards the beginning of the movie that they, “dated for a second like, 200 years ago”. Which, to be fair, is super lesbian of them.
You can stream NYAD on Netflix.
Excellent excellent excellent review