A Movie About the Singular Intensity of Endurance Athletes
Annette Bening’s portrayal of a legendary swimmer in Nyad ultimately succumbs to narrative cliché.
For years, the filmmaking team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi has specialized in making documentaries about athletes and adventurers who push the very limits of human survival. The directors’ critical peak came with the 2018 documentary, but in works such as and they painted portraits of mountaineers and cave divers who exist to perform nigh-impossible feats of endurance. So it’s no surprise that their first foray into making a narrative, a biopic about the distance swimmer Diana Nyad, whose athletic goals were challenging to the point of being absurd.
