If you liked Free Solo (2018), the winner of Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Academy Awards, you'll like the first, narrative from the same filmmakers, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. Free Solo was about Alex Honnold, an athlete engaging in an individual sport that is one of endurance and extreme danger. This film, which is an adaptation of Diana Nyad's autobiography, is yet another story of an athlete engaging in an individual sport that is enduring and dangerous. Instead of rock climbing, this film is about marathon swimming. Not many features have been made on the subject. If you get a feature on someone in the water, most times it will be about an Olympic athlete. Marathon or distance swimming hasn't really gotten the big screen treatment.
In Free Solo, Honnold was truly alone. For Diana Nyad, played here by Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right and American Beauty), her sport requires somewhat of a support team. Most athletes need some kind of support. Whether one is a swimmer or a boxer, he or she will need a coach or sponsors. However, for Diana, she requires a bit more logistical support in order to be successful in her endeavor. What came to mind is Ford v Ferrari (2019), which is about car racing. Diana isn't in a regulated competition like that one, but auto matches involve racers needing a pit crew and Diana needs something similar.
Jodie Foster (Panic Room and The Silence of the Lambs) co-stars as Bonnie Stoll, the best friend to Diana. When she was younger, she was a racquetball player. She's a lesbian who lives in Los Angeles and is in her late 50's or 60's. She doesn't seem to be in a romantic relationship. She does have a dog. Her primary connection is to Diana. She loves Diana, but it's only platonic between them. At Diana's 60th birthday, Bonnie is asked if she would be Diana's swim coach, despite never having done so before.
Diana has a dream of swimming from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida. It's a 103-mile journey, which would require 60 hours or more of Diana in the water. Diana hoped to be an Olympic swimmer when she was younger until she was molested by her swim coach. How Vasarhelyi and Chin reveal that information is quick and clever, but Diana got into distance swimming as she got older and tried the Cuba-to-Florida swim in her 20's, sometime in the 1970's. Now, in the 2010's, and as a middle-aged woman, she is attempting that same trek.
Unlike Free Solo, it's more difficult to give proper scope of the athletic challenge that the Cuba-to-Florida swim presents. When Diana is in the water, it's difficult to chart and follow her. It's more difficult than it was following Honnold, as he climbed a mountain. The water is more of a barrier than the air. That difficulty makes the film more thrilling, but it also presents more of a challenge in the visual storytelling. It's a challenge that Vasarhelyi and Chin have somewhat tackled before by way of their previous documentary The Rescue (2021).
That 2021 documentary involved people having to swim a long distance through a tight but vast cave. That distance was about three miles and took about five hours. It's a great distance, but it's more manageable than the Cuba-to-Florida swim. It might also be easier to depict the claustrophobia and the terror that was at the center of The Rescue. The visual storytelling task of this film is almost the opposite because it's hundreds of miles of open water, that is the Gulf of Mexico.
Vasarhelyi and Chin can't really tackle that in the same way or in a way that wouldn't get bogged down in maritime navigation or deep diving into oceanography. Therefore, their narrative is less about the journey and it's more about the toll this endeavor takes. There's the obvious physical toll and physical danger that is sold by the look on Diana's face, thanks to this film's makeup team and Bening's exhaustive performance. There's the emotional toll on Diana's team. Chief among them is Bonnie. This experience in fact tests Bonnie's friendship and what she's willing to sacrifice for her friend's happiness Foster's performance in her own charming way sells that toll and is very affecting by the end.
Rated PG-13 for sexual abuse, some strong language and partial nudity.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 1 min.
Available on Netflix.