Movie Review

Annette Bening recreates great swimming achievement in inspiring Nyad

Even for fans, significant sports accomplishments and milestones have a way of fading away over time. People of a certain age may remember the name of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who swam around Manhattan and from the Bahamas to Florida in the late 1970s. But do you remember that her most significant swimming feat came just 10 years ago when she was 64 years old?

That event, her swimming over 100 miles from Cuba to Key West, Florida, is at the center of Nyad. Annette Bening stars as Nyad, who - when the film begins - is 30 years removed from her ‘70s heyday, living an anonymous life in Los Angeles with her best friend, Bonnie (Jodie Foster). Even though it’s been forever since she swam competitively, a desire to not just sit around in the twilight of her life leads her to take up the sport again.

She soon goes from recreational laps at the neighborhood pool to an obsessive need to do the only thing that eluded her in her younger years, the Cuba-to-Florida swim, something that no other swimmer had been able to do either. With her intense personality, she convinces Bonnie to be her coach, and hires a team – including navigator John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) – to help guide her through the notoriously tough waters.

Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, and written by Julia Cox from Nyad’s autobiography, the film is inspirational, but not in the faux way that some schmaltzy movies can be. Instead, the filmmakers rouse by showing just how insanely difficult that particular swim is, with its swift crossing currents and dangerous sea creatures, especially for a woman of her age.

Chin and Vasarhelyi, directing their first narrative feature after years of helming documentaries like Free Solo, devote themselves to verisimilitude here, putting Bening (and, likely, a stunt double) into the open water instead of overusing CGI. That effort pays real dividends, as there’s just something about seeing someone actually swimming in rough seas that ups the stakes of the story.

Even though Nyad is the protagonist of the story, they don’t try to hide her ornery personality. She has a monomaniacal focus on her goal that sometimes puts her and those who are helping her in danger. They also repeatedly show her alienating conversation partners with a need to tell them the complete details about her swimming achievements, making her seem like not the most fun person to be around in general.

Bening is as good as ever in the lead role, laying herself bare in multiple ways to inhabit Nyad’s persona. The same age as Nyad was during the events in the film, she shows that the right pairing of actor and part can yield great results. Foster is equally impressive, delivering a performance that is definitely supporting, but still shows her star skills. Ifans, playing a rare American, is also solid in a limited appearance.

Nyad has a few clunky moments, but for the most part it’s a well-told and -staged story about an athlete defying the odds. Perhaps this film will keep Nyad’s remarkable triumph from vanishing from world’s memory, with the help of two of the best actors in recent Hollywood history.

---

Nyad is currently playing at IPIC Theater in Houston and debuts on Netflix on November 3.

Photo by Liz Parkinson/Netflix

Annette Bening in Nyad.

movies film

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

---

Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

movies film