Fierce and Furious: How Nyad Says “F**k That!” to Ageing Quietly
It’s the superhero movie we need: the incredible true story of the open-ocean swimmer who hit her 60s, and realised she couldn’t give up on her dream.
good.film
a year ago
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Why should I see Nyad?
More than just an inspiring sports story, Nyad invites us to reframe everything we know about determination, physical limits, and how we define ageing - especially for women.
What social causes does the film explore?
Sports & Recreation, Survivors & Victims, Female Empowerment
In Hollywood - like most of the rest of the world - sex sells. It’s a sad reality that women in their thirties are paired up with blokes on screen decades their senior; that stars in their forties feel the pressure to make their faces tighter and shinier with every movie; and that roles for women over 50 dry up faster than a profiterole left in the sun.
Welcome to the movie that takes all of that and throws it overboard. Nyad is a screen story with grit, with vision, and with a sinewy bravado, centred on two women in their sixties - so already, we’re in rare air for Hollywood. Throw in the fact that there’s zero male love interest (both are out lesbians) and they’re driven by clear goals of their own volition, and Nyad aces the Bechdel test before you’ve even bitten into your choctop.
Documentary-turned-feature filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin take us to the open ocean with Nyad, the real-life story of the marathon attempts to swim over 100 miles from Cuba to Florida by the unusually-monikered Diana Nyad. Her Greek family name means “water nymph” in ancient Greek mythology - a factoid you simply wouldn’t believe if it were scripted. But as you’ll see, there’s a lot about the blazingly determined Diana Nyad that’s nearly impossible to believe.
Who is Diana Nyad?
Diana Nyad today is a 74-year-old author and journo, who inspires people worldwide as a motivational speaker. But the New Yorker made her name decades ago, in the mid-70s, as a competitive swimmer. And we’re talking extreme swimming here: at the age of 26, she swam around Manhattan island - a distance of 28 miles. It took her nearly 8 hours.
Not content to stop there, Nyad then set a world record for distance swimming in open water - for either men or women - making the 102 mile swim between the Bahamas to Florida, and all without a shark cage (even more impressive when you consider Jaws fever was still thick in the air!). But while her record-breaking swim cemented her fame and her rep as an endurance swimmer, Nyad still had a dream unfulfilled.
The year before, she had set her sights on her steepest challenge: swimming Cuba to the Florida Keys. But while the distance was nearly identical to her Bahamas swim, the force of the Gulf current that swept between her and her goal made this swim far tougher - many experts actually deemed it humanly impossible.
That sets the scene for Nyad, the movie, as we meet Diana turning 60 and growing increasingly frustrated with existence. “Where’s the excellence?” she barks at her lifelong friend Bonnie, grasping for the ingredient she’s missing as she enters her seventh decade. It’s a nice round number, but at this new age, what is she supposed to define her life by? She’s dissatisfied, searching for that competitive spark, and Scrabble battles aren’t cutting it.
Then, like a great ocean leviathan, Nyad’s long-held dream seems to grip her and won’t let go. “I’m gonna do it. The Cuba swim. It’s my time,” she announces to a mystified Bonnie. Sixty or not, from the steely look in her eyes, you’d be brave to bet against her.
How does Nyad explore ageing?
Nyad kicks off with a surprise party, and there’s plenty of candles on the cake. But Diana doesn’t seem fazed by her age - more like, society’s response to it. "You turn 60 and the world decides you're a bag of bones,” Diana grumbles. Something she couldn’t agree with less.
Diana takes her ageing body in good humour, though: trying on a new swimsuit, she notices with a detached curiosity how her breasts sit lower under the lycra than they did 30 years ago; laughing with Bonnie when it’s suggested they try to take on female-friendly sponsors (“Like what, tampons? We don’t need those anymore, thank God.”)
Where Diana gets serious, though, is when her age is given as a reason not to try. When it becomes crystal clear that she’s NOT joking about attempting her Cuba to Florida swim again, she simply refuses to accept that it’s no longer possible at 60 - even though the planet’s elite marathon swimmers would struggle to tackle it at half that age.
Bonnie sits Diana down at one point and, gently but firmly, tries to explain that it’s just beyond the scope of human limits. And she’s done her research. “Sports scientists don’t believe it’s possible,” she says (bracing for a fiery rejoinder). “Especially for a woman. Especially a woman your age.” Diana’s response is good & strong: “Oh yeah? Well, fuck that.”
But while its core theme revolves around “age is just a number”, don’t make the mistake of writing off Nyad as a cute movie your Mum would like (reminder though: ring your Mum). It’s a film for anyone, and it offers much more than your standard Seniors matinee combo with coffee & cake. It also just makes you grin hearing a woman in her 60s flat out refusing to take no for a fucking answer! #fistpump
“This film asks: What do we give ourselves permission to do in our lives?”
~ Annette Bening
How does Nyad examine determination and will?
The movie doesn’t sugarcoat Diana Nyad’s infamous stubbornness, and we immediately see that she’s a prickly pear, to put it mildly. If this was a Western, and Nyad was a cowboy, we’re sure someone in a bar would call her a tough son-of-a-bitch within the first reel. But Bening brings a deep humanity to Diana Nyad that overcomes her blunt, stop-at-nothing nature.
She’s a pain, but that’s just how she’s built. As a weary Bonnie asks Diana in one scene, “Do you have any idea how exhausting you are as a friend?” Diana seems to know it, but she’s not about to apologise for it. After all, the qualities that make her brash and selfish and insanely frustrating are the very same ones that push her through an unimaginable pain barrier, as she ploughs through miles of open ocean (studies in sports physiology have shown that in “extreme” sports, mental determination actually matters more than youth or physical energy).
As refusal to admit defeat goes, it’s on another level. But Diana’s gasp-inducing, goatish nature is also inspiring as hell.
In interviews, Bening freely admits to being daunted in the extreme taking on the role of one of the planet’s greatest ever athletes. She needn’t have worried. Aside from fully convincing us physically as a long-distance swimmer, the intensity Bening brings to her eyes as Nyad is spot on, burning with pin-pricks of white-hot determination. Or perhaps they’re diamonds, echoing the mantra on Diana’s gym room poster: “A diamond is just a lump of coal that stuck with it.”
“That woman [Bening] has the strongest will I’ve ever seen on a movie set.”
~ Jodie Foster
What does Nyad have to say about surviving sexual assault?
Nyad is at its most filmic when the filmmakers introduce a sub-theme of Diana’s trauma after a teenage sexual assault by a critical figure in her life, which we won’t spoil here. It’s implied that this longheld trauma is part of the driving force that pushes Diana so hard. Thematically, then, Diana’s trauma and her determination are psychologically intertwined.
But is she swimming to escape the pain, or using it as fuel? Diana admits to Bonnie that while she’s reconciled what happened to her, she still hears her abuser’s voice. It haunts and follows her, after all these years. She feels ashamed that it’s imprinted on her; that it’s left a mark.
Using the power of cinematic visual cues, Nyad reminds us that there’s no one-size-fits-all response to trauma. Diana swims because she wants to; not to swim away from her past, but towards her destiny. While a sexual assault may be part of her history, she refuses to let it define her story.
Does Nyad feel like a movie, or a documentary?
A bit of both! As skilled documentarians, it’s no surprise that husband & wife duo Chin and Vasarhelyi (who won the Academy Award for their feature doc Free Solo) inject Nyad with so many gripping real-life touches. And the ocean-going scenes feel seriously convincing.
There’s a boatload of clips of the real Diana Nyad, flashes of her past: prepping herself and giving feisty interviews both before and after she hits the ocean. And facts & stats on screen ensure we always know things like how many miles Diana has swum (and, reinforcing the theme, how old she is at each attempt).
It’s also refreshing that the filmmakers aren’t hung up on “matching” Annette Bening’s look to the real Diana Nyad. They cut between real interviews and film footage and there’s really no issue. Her haircut’s the same - and obviously Bening has physically crushed the role, undertaking a full year of training to play the marathon swimmer - and that’s enough.
“The physical performance that Annette was able to tap into was really incredible. We went to great lengths in the film to be able to live up to that.”
~ co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
What are critics saying about Nyad?
“A stirring tale of dreams and determination, given added appeal by the fact that women in their 60s so rarely get to front this kind of story.”
- Wendy Ide, Screen International
“One of the very few films that’s anchored around two women who are queer and in their 60s and how they go about achieving a remarkable feat.”
- Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury
“This is Bening’s Rocky, a performance that draws on every muscle… Definitely a 60-is-the-new-30 movie.”
- Thelma Adams, AARP
“The filmmakers put the audience in the middle of their heroine’s past traumas that explain her determination to succeed despite nearly impossible odds.”
- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts with the good.film community!
So what’s the takeaway from Nyad?
It’s never easy to get real life stories right: people’s obstacles and goals don’t always fit into neat, narrative boxes. But in the case of Nyad, Diana’s mission is so massive, and her determination so superhuman, it’s like they were destined to hit the screen. Her inbuilt “when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object” story is the stuff that movie scriptwriters dream of - then scribble out, thinking no audience will possibly believe it.
Nyad is immensely satisfying on a very deep level: its fiercely unapologetic way in presenting real women over 60 on screen, with real bodies and real faces. There’s not a Botox needle within a hundred miles of this set, and Amen to that. As swimmer and coach, Bening and Foster - who have each been acting for well over 50 years - aren’t shy about the camera catching every vein and wrinkle. And honestly, it’s such a relief to see.
Both literally and figuratively, Diana Nyad screams “I will not accept defeat. I will never give up. I am never too old!” And Nyad the movie shouts a question to us, too. To quote the Mary Oliver poem that inspires Diana’s blazing comeback, “This is your one wild and precious life - so what are you going to do with it?”
