Annette Bening has another chance to make Diana proud. The Irish Film and TV Academy (IFTA) nominated Bening for its Best International Actress award. She’ll face three of her Oscar foes — Lily Gladstone, Carey Mulligan, and Emma Stone — along with two actresses many critics thought the Oscars snubbed: Margot Robbie for Barbie and Greta Lee for Past Lives.
The IFTA will announce the winners in Dublin on April 20. Go n-éirí leat, Annette!
“Ethical Nonfiction Backgrounds”
According to The New York Times, Diana Nyad and Bonnie Stoll were “shown the [Nyad] script throughout the revision process until it was closed for feedback.”
The article doesn’t clarify why the filmmakers stopped showing them the script. Co-director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi didn’t help when she said they needed to “protect” the story, the writer, and the movie, “but then it’s also about respecting the process of your actors.”
The real reason? The filmmakers probably got tired of Nyad pestering them to make her less of a jerk.
Steven Munatones also received access to early versions of the screenplay. Munatones is the guy who, among other things, illegitimately “ratified” Nyad’s crossing, created a fake organization to help that happen, and lied about his Tsugaru and Catalina crossings.
“They allowed me to read it,” Steven said in a webinar the day after Nyad opened in theaters. “And you know, as a marathon swimmer and someone who actually saw the failed attempts, I mentioned different things” (clip).
(He also said in the webinar, “I can explain the rules that she went under.” He never did. See also his statement a week after Nyad’s crossing that he’d distribute copies of the rules. Over ten years later, we’re still waiting.)
So, the only experienced marathon swimmers who looked at the script were the three people least likely to point out inaccuracies and lies. I wonder if that’s what Vasarhelyi meant when she said of the controversy roiling around Nyad:
We brought our most clear-eyed, stringent, ethical nonfiction backgrounds to look at it, and it really seemed irrelevant.
Another Angle
A quick DNFC shout-out to Vulture’s Rachel Handler.
In her article, “‘I Thought Oppenheimer Was Mediocre’: What I saw, overheard, and swallowed behind the scenes at the 2024 Oscars,” she includes Diana and Bonnie with high-exposure celebrities like Emma Stone and John Cena. Handler writes,
Diana Nyad and Bonnie Stoll stop to chat with a group of fans. Diana is raving about Bradley Cooper and stressing about the camera angle that might hit her if she’s sitting in the balcony.
In case readers hadn’t seen Nyad, Handler links to Vulture colleague Allison Willmore’s review, “To Its Credit, Nyad Makes Its Subject Look Like a Real Asshole.”
Handler ends with the one A-list attendee for whom camera angles and Academy awards mean nothing. “The lobby empties,” writes Handler, “but Messi the dog wanders in. It’s his time now.”
Nyad (The Movie) Proves That Nyad (The Swimmer) Is A Master Con Artist
Diana Nyad has convinced almost everyone that she’s a well-meaning and generally honest person who, decades ago, stretched the truth a little and now wishes she hadn’t. However, she’s actually a compulsive liar who desperately wants people to think she’s the best at everything — except for the one thing at which she excels.
The film doesn’t begin to show the depth of her fraud. She and her representatives bamboozled Netflix, Mad Chance, and Black Bear Pictures into coughing up tens of millions of dollars to adapt her fabrication-filled memoir, Find a Way, into a feature-length fairy tale.
Then they pawned it off as genuine.
According to the Netflix Media Center, “NYAD tells the remarkable true story of athlete Diana Nyad.” Or, as co-director Vasarhelyi told Vanity Fair:
We don’t say, ‘It’s based on a true story,’ we don’t say, ‘It is a true story’—but it is a true story. It’s about this idea of truth.
Here’s the truth (and not just the idea of truth): The film is based on a remarkable lie Nyad has been telling since she stumbled onto Key West’s Smathers Beach in September 2013.
What Vaserhelyi’s statement means is anyone’s guess. But we don’t have to guess about the film; she and her husband, Jimmy Chin, made a movie that lies for Diana.
Their film contained two kinds of inaccuracies. First, variations that serve mainly to streamline the story. For instance:
- One boat instead of five.
- Backdating Chloë McCardel’s 2013 Cuba-Florida attempt to 2012.
- Bonnie jumping into the water to give Diana a pep talk. (As far as we know, this didn’t happen.)
The second type of inaccuracy is a lie that reinforces Nyad’s self-mythologizing. For instance:
- “The English Channel, for example, is 21 miles. I could swim that in seven and a half hours, even in the cold.” Even if she could deal with the cold, which she couldn’t, Nyad could never have made the crossing in seven and a half hours.*
- “[Jack Nelson is] still in the Swimming Hall of Fame even after all of us came forward and said we were abused by him, said it in public.” No one besides Nyad has ever publicly accused Nelson of abuse.**
- Bonnie jumping into the water to give Diana a pep talk after first assuring her, “No, no, no — I’m not gonna touch you.” Bonnie and others touched Nyad throughout the crossing.†
* Even at her peak, Nyad couldn’t have come close to that time — if she could finish at all: She attempted the English Channel three times and failed at each attempt. As of 2023, 2,487 swimmers have swum the English Channel. Of those, only eight men and one woman— Czeckoslovakia’s Yvetta Hlaváčová — completed the crossing in seven and a half hours or less. Only two other women — the USA’s Penny Dean and Australia’s Tamara Bruce — have gone under eight hours.
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** Whenever Nyad says that other women have made public allegations against Nelson, she’s lying. When her surrogates say other women have made such allegations, they’re parroting Nyad’s untruths. Nelson could probably have sued the filmmakers if he were still alive. Since he’s not, they can get away with saying whatever they want.
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† Throughout the film, Nyad and Stoll follow the cardinal rule of marathon swimming: The swimmer can’t touch the boat or another person. The filmmakers understood that viewers would question the crossing’s legitimacy if they showed what really happened — Bonnie and other crew members touching Diana throughout the endeavor.
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• • •
Unlike most scams, Diana’s has never been about money. She needs everyone to love her, and she thinks she can make that happen.
In an interview a month after Find a Way’s October 2015 publication, Nyad addressed what she called “the Lance Armstrong era”:
As soon as you achieve something of a heroic status, and [as] soon as everybody loves you, and they respond to what you represent, then the haters come right along. (Blue Sky, November 4, 2015)
But her fans have never responded to what she represents; they respond to what she tricks them into believing she represents — tenacity, courage, teamwork, chasing big dreams, etc.
Meanwhile, her critics respond to what she is: selfish and deceitful; someone who denigrates others to exalt herself; someone who lies repeatedly, brazenly, and without remorse.
The movie ignores Nyad’s lifetime of lies while giving her the adoration she craves.
It’s her time now.
