There is something mythic about the story of Diana Nyad, the first (and, to date, only) person to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to the US without the use of a shark cage. Nyad was 64 and on her fifth attempt when she succeeded in 2013, a feat that should not have been humanly possible. As well as the sharks, there were deadly box jellyfish, and the Gulf stream itself, threatening to sweep her away from the support boat and out into the ocean. Her success was inspiring and continues to inspire, although, as we see in Nyad, the new Netflix biopic, not always in the obvious ways.
You would have to be a maniac to attempt – and keep attempting – what Nyad did, and this is the energy brought by the actor Annette Bening to the title role. Bening’s heroine is capricious, raging, solipsistic to the point of narcissism, and wholly indefatigable. At an age at which people in general and women in particular are not considered apex performers, Nyad breaks her 30-year hiatus on swimming and, for all the reasons people make radical changes at that stage of life – fear of death, fear of obsolescence, fury at the realisation that this is all going to be much shorter than anticipated – gets back in the pool. She is, per the movie, a total nightmare of a person – and also blows your mind.
The details of what she survived in the water never get old: more than 50 hours of swimming nonstop, with frequent vomiting from the churn of the waves, and support kayaks on either side to bang sharks on the nose should they get too close. On that final swim, after earlier attempts had failed when Nyad was nearly killed by the jellyfish, she swam encased in a resistant sheath that covered her entire face and body.
It is a thrilling odyssey, but the story of Nyad becomes particularly fascinating when you look at what happened after the swim. Like similar stories of human achievement, the motivational uses to which Nyad’s story have been put are extremely obvious and also extremely effective. A few years ago, I saw her one-woman show in New York, at a performance attended by her great fan and supporter Hillary Clinton. In the show, Nyad told the story both of her record-breaking swim and of her life prior to that, in particular the molestation she suffered at the hands of her male swimming coach when she was a teenage champion. It was painful to watch, not least because, in regards to that trauma, Nyad was reluctant to make any hokey generalised points about “endurance”.
Both in the show and the movie, this is an important distinction between the swim and what happened during her adolescence. Nyad’s account of the molestation is neither grist for a survival story, nor something she presents as an obstacle she overcame to become a better person. It is simply a traumatic event, plainly stated, in which the telling itself is the endurance.
And yet, of course, the motivational speaker circuit invites the rest of us to extrapolate and apply to our own lives precisely these lessons from her extraordinary swim. Clinton’s affection for the “she persisted” narrative embedded in Nyad’s story is both understandable and utterly cringeworthy. Swimming 110 miles through shark-infested waters wouldn’t seem to map on to recovering from a failed presidential campaign, or staying in a marriage with a husband who cheated. Except, of course, that in the way these things work, it absolutely does.
The curious thing about the Nyad movie is that in some ways, the really inspiring figure isn’t Bening as Nyad, but Jodie Foster in the role of her coach, Bonnie Stoll, in what is Foster’s first overtly gay role. It’s wild, honestly. Foster presents as a completely different version of herself than any we have seen on screen before, in a role described by Variety magazine as “butch and brash and eager”. (I’d quibble with “butch”; she plays a sporty lesbian, which isn’t quite the same thing.) It makes one realise, with a pang, how clenched and closed off – how anxious – she has been in previous roles, and as Variety goes on to point out, “closes the loop on a public narrative that Foster herself has played out with mixed feelings”. As an example of a journey of length and endurance more human in scale than Nyad’s, it is truly inspiring to watch.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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