Exactly four years ago Kaiser noted that Annette Bening was “One of the most famously Oscar-snubbed actors out there.” Still true! The situation has not been rectified. Will this be her year? I don’t think so. Not because she isn’t superb as Diana Nyad in Nyad, now on Netflix. She’s physically incapable of delivering anything less than flawless performances of brilliantly flawed women. It just feels like she hasn’t been part of the Best Actress conversation much, at least not compared to the younger actresses in contention. Then again, all bets are off this year, what with the strikes delaying the usual promo campaigns, and no one knowing exactly who the voting body is at the Golden Globes since the Hollywood Foreign Press Association disbanded. Speaking of, Annette did nab a Golden Globe nomination for Nyad, and she has a new interview out in This Guardian this week. I’m excerpting one section here, but the whole piece is worth a read.
She [Bening] took the role of Nyad because it was “such a great story”, but she hadn’t thought through what playing the swimmer would mean – the “oh, it’s me in the water; oh, I’m in a bathing suit; oh, I’ve got to really pull off the swimming”, she says. It took a year of training, with the Olympian Rada Owen. Bening reckons she is a better swimmer now than when she shot the film, because she has fallen in love with the sport. “What I’ve come to understand about Diana, what I admire, is not only the fact that she swam 54 hours; it was that she found the ability to think enough of herself to say: ‘I have the right to say I’m going to do this thing.’ I think that is what a lot of us struggle with.”
Nyad has written a number of books about her career, which the film picks through judiciously. “She had a coach who abused her when she was a kid,” says Bening. “We didn’t want to make the movie about that, but it is part of who she is. And what happened to her as a teenager, with this coach, did inform her swimming and it did inform her 20s. Just like all of us, right? All these things that we’ve gone through, they inform us in the present.”
Bening is keen to underline that the film amps up a spikiness in Nyad’s character. Nyad is delightful, says Bening. In her on-screen portrayal, however, she is often a pain in everyone’s neck, especially Jodie Foster’s (Foster plays her ex-girlfriend and best friend). “When women have complexity, when women are difficult, our metric for being able to accept them is so different,” she says. “It’s like politicians: there’s always this sense that they have to be likable. There’s a quality that a woman has to have that’s non-threatening and pleasing. Either that, or they have to be very conservative. Like Thatcher. We can accept a woman if she’s very conservative, but the idea of a liberal woman is much scarier.”
[From The Guardian]
“Spikiness” is a great way to describe Annette’s version of Diana Nyad, and she’s so good at playing that quality (remember her in 2009’s Mother and Child?). I mean really, the Diana of the film cannot stop talking about herself or her “destiny.” She’s the kind of person that you know you would find insufferable in real life but delight in watching as a movie character. (Again, we’re talking about the heightened film depiction, not Diana Nyad in real life.) And that gets at exactly what Annette talks about with the expectations on women. In Nyad, Annette is a woman out to please herself first and foremost, and is unabashedly unlikable, at times even to her dearest friends and supporters. But she has an ambition — to swim the open ocean from Cuba to Florida, 103 miles — and as the movie unfolds we see how a woman fulfilling her goal can be threatening to those around her. Why? Because it forces anyone watching her to reckon with their own dreams, and whether they’ve honestly done everything they could to fully realize them.
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