In 'Nyad,' Annette Bening and Jodie Foster shatter the limits of age

There are two foes in the film “Nyad”: nature and age. It is no spoiler to say that Annette Bening and Jodie Foster achieve a conquest over those opponents, not in some trite, scripted or airbrushed way, but with the sinews and cartilage of real athletes. Every now and then a cultural moment comes along that exposes how severely and artificially we continue to limit the conceptual range of female ideals, and the cannonball biceps of these two actresses in their 60s constitutes a significant one. Sun-scorched, straw-haired, scored with tendons, they are glorious.

“Nyad,” directed by husband and wife Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi of “Free Solo” fame, is a biopic of the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad’s 110-mile open water journey from Cuba to Florida in 2013 at age 64 with the help of her closest friend and trainer, Bonnie Stoll. But there is a story within a story in the film, which debuts on Netflix on Friday: the partnership of two women frustrated by a Hollywood culture that permits so few dynamic roles for mature women, and who do something about it. When “Nyad” began filming in a 233-by-233-foot tank of water off the coast of the Dominican Republic in April 2022, Bening showed up on set for a “safety” rehearsal with stunt doubles — whom she promptly rendered bystanders. She knifed into the water and glided the length of the tank, swimming 70 yards with elite-quality strokes that barely rippled the water. “We were all jaw-dropped,” says Chin.

Chin, a fabled extreme athlete himself who has scaled peaks, skied Mount Everest and grew up swimming competitively, had not known until that moment how committed Bening was in preparing for the role. “We weren’t sure how far she was willing to take it,” he says. They left Bening alone during preproduction “to respect the actor’s process.” Bening used the time to train every day for a year under the tutelage of a former U.S. Olympian, Rada Owen. “She was incredibly strong, her stroke was beautiful, she was just flying through the water,” Chin says. " … She took it all the way.” Bening was “adamant” that she would swim every stroke in the film — which meant spending four to eight hours a day in the water. “One of the unanticipated consequences was that she was so strong, she had this endurance which allowed us to maximize our shooting schedule,” Vasarhelyi says.

Bening, 65, and Foster, 60, have been unable to promote the film because of the screen actors strike. But it’s plain in conversation with their filmmakers and trainers that both women explicitly wanted to shatter age archetypes — really, really break them all to pieces. “It was important to both actors that we not touch their bodies, as in touch up,” Vasarhelyi said. “They were committed to play women of their age.” They were also committed to demonstrating the metamorphosing possibilities of strenuous athleticism. Foster told the directors she wanted to join the film in part because she wanted to show audiences two older women who were “badasses.”

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