Jodie Foster’s role in the new film “Nyad” is a triumph, and something more. Standing out spikily amid a fairly conventional sports biopic, the part provides a deserved spotlight to a generationally gifted star. It also, trickily, closes the loop on a public narrative that Foster herself has played out with mixed feelings.
In “Nyad” (in theaters now ahead of a Nov. 3 Netflix bow), Annette Bening portrays the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who, with the encouragement of best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll (Foster), completes a crossing from Cuba to Key West in 2013. Both Nyad and Stoll, in the film as in life, are out lesbians. Their bond stems from shared history (the pair, we’re told, briefly dated), and from a sense of themselves as outsiders.
Diana’s the protagonist, but especially while she’s underwater, it’s Bonnie who’ll keep you watching. Wiry and clad in wonky Ray-Ban sports glasses and an ever-present bandanna, Bonnie has all the Foster toughness viewers will recall from films like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Panic Room,” but with a twist. That grit and plainspokenness now exists within the context of her character’s queerness.
It’s a good look on Foster, not least because her own 2013 saw her grappling with how out she felt comfortable being. Standing onstage at the Golden Globes to accept the Cecil B. DeMille Award, the star teased that she would finally confirm the long-held supposition that she was a lesbian, before declaring, “I am … single.” Furthermore, she thanked “my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life,” Cydney Bernard. There was little ambiguity as to what Foster was trying to express. What was left unclear, in a rollicking, ebullient, complex speech, was how much she wanted to express it at all. Foster balefully noted that, as a former child star, she’d “had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds.” She added that she considered the end of privacy a loss for herself and for society: “Privacy. Someday, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.”
Foster has, gradually, shown a little more of herself: Winning another Globe for the movie “The Mauritanian” at the COVID-curtailed 2021 ceremony, she Zoomed in from her couch with dog and girlfriend in tow. And she would be absolutely entitled to make her own choices about what and how much of herself to share even before one considers her history as the object of the gaze — first playing a child prostitute in “Taxi Driver” at 12, then becoming the obsession of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley in her college years. In that light, her reticence seems especially understandable, and there seemed little reason to believe that the person who gave this speech might someday plunge as deep into an out queer role as Foster does in “Nyad.”
There’s also the fact that her speech included her musing she might quit the movie business altogether. Thank goodness she didn’t: Foster, here, is as good as she’s been in years, and particularly sharpens Bening’s performance. Diana Nyad, as written, has hazy motivations for doing this punishing swim: Bonnie Stoll’s presence clarifies the journey, and brings the viewers along for the ride. Diana can be inarticulate and off-putting even to her intimates; Bonnie, butch and brash and eager, acts as her lifeline to the world outside the water. And it’s because Bonnie lives so confidently as herself — even when her best friend seems uncertain of why she’s putting herself through such an arduous journey — that she is such a great character. It’s a moment worth marking as Foster, having fought for the life she wants and remaining a particularly private celebrity, now appears in a film as a strong-willed, passionate lesbian who has a way with a well-phrased monologue. “Nyad” is about Diana. But it’s, at least a little bit, about Jodie too.
