Article from NY Times on A Beautiful Mind

[Guest guest]

This article is a little longer than I would normally like to post

here, but since we were having an active conversation about verite' in

cinema (especially where it applies to Nash and his schizophrenia) I

thought you might enjoy reading this.

 

Blessings,

Crow

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A 'Mind' Is a Hazardous Thing to Distort

 

By A. O. SCOTT

 

o anyone who has read " A Beautiful Mind, " Sylvia Nasar's biography

of the

mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., the past few weeks have been

mind-boggling.

 

The book, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner published in

1998, was loosely

adapted by Akiva Goldsman and Ron Howard into the film, which was

nominated for

eight Oscars. It has also become, in recent weeks, the subject of a

curiously nasty

entertainment-industry dust-up.

 

Gossip columnists have trumpeted a series of " revelations " about Mr.

Nash that seem

to undermine the movie's view of him, and these tidbits — involving

homosexuality,

anti-Semitism and the fathering of an illegitimate child — have been

taken as evidence

of a smear campaign by rival studios looking to win the best-picture

statue for their

own offerings. As the charges swirled around the movie, Mr. Nash and

his wife, Alicia,

appeared on " 60 Minutes " to deny all the allegations.

 

It is surely dismaying to Ms. Nasar's readers — as it clearly is to

the author herself,

who has taken strong exception to the recent articles — to see her

scrupulous and

sensitive biography used to tar its subject with innuendo.

 

That said, the movie — with a very different purpose from these

statements about Mr.

Nash and in a way that is by no means morally or artistically

equivalent — also

simplifies and distorts the complex and fascinating life presented in

the book.

 

The smears should not automatically excuse the movie for its own

inaccuracies. The

decision to change a true story — to delete material that may confuse

or disturb

viewers, to telescope chronology, to insert composite or entirely

fictional characters into

historical events — is as much an artistic (and therefore an ethical)

choice as the

casting of a certain actor or the selection of a camera angle. And

such choices are the

basis of critical judgment.

 

At issue, it seems to me, is not literal accuracy but credibility.

Real life is messy, and

the human character is often contradictory and hard to read. Movies —

large-scale,

commercially ambitious Hollywood movies in particular — prefer clear

story lines and

unambiguous emotions. They would rather uplift than challenge or

disturb.

 

It is hardly news that a great deal of difficult material from the

book was left out of the

film version of " A Beautiful Mind. " Nowhere does Ms. Nasar, a former

economics

reporter for The New York Times, say that Mr. Nash is a bigot, a

homosexual or a bad

father. But she documents the paranoid delusions caused by his

schizophrenia, some of

which caused him to lash out against Jews; his intense friendships

with men

(characterized by one colleague as " romantic " ); and his relationship

with Eleanor Stiers,

with whom he was involved before he married Alicia Larde, and with

whom he had a

son. Mr. Goldsman, the screenwriter, and Mr. Howard, the director,

made no secret of

the liberties they had taken with their source, and a number of

reviewers (including

me) objected to some of those liberties.

 

At the bookstores that share mall space with the multiplexes showing

" A Beautiful

Mind, " you will find prominently displayed copies of Ms. Nasar's book

(with Russell

Crowe's picture on the cover). You can document the discrepancies

between book and

movie yourself and decide whether they matter.

 

My opinion, as I have made clear at some length, is that they do. All

the movie-industry

spin and counterspin has drowned out an important argument, not only

about " A

Beautiful Mind " but about how faithful movies should be to the reality

they depict and

how far they can stray from the historical record.

 

Two years ago, " The Hurricane " — Norman Jewison's film about the

imprisonment and

eventual vindication of Rubin Carter, known as Hurricane, the boxer

who was

convicted for murder — was criticized for slighting the lawyers who

had worked to free

him. The intervention of a young African-American boy and his

guardians seemed to

make a better story, as did the invention of a racist New Jersey

policemen (played by

Dan Hedaya) who pursued Denzel Washington's Carter like Javert chasing

Jean

Valjean in " Les Misérables. "

 

The transgression in that case — as in the cases of " J.F.K. " and

" Mississippi Burning "

before it — was not against biography but against history. The

character played by Mr.

Hedaya is a familiar Hollywood archetype: the lone white racist who

exists to soothe the

consciences of the white audience with the fiction that racism is

caused by maladjusted

individuals, rather than by systemic injustice. A difficult passage in

American history

was thus smoothed over and made palatable and familiar. Something

similar happens

to the cold war in " A Beautiful Mind, " in which the paranoia and

uncertainty of

McCarthy-era academic life is reduced to spy-movie clichés.

 

This kind of simplification is in some ways more troubling than the

fudging or forgetting

of the details of Mr. Nash's life, like his divorce or his arrest for

indecent exposure. In

the treatment of the story's intellectual and political context, the

choices Mr. Goldsman

and Mr. Howard have made misrepresent something larger than a single

man's

experience.

 

The brouhaha over " A Beautiful Mind " replays an argument that has

become an

award-season ritual. But if the arguments seem predictable, they are

nonetheless

important, partly because it is impossible to formulate a general rule

of cinematic

accuracy, and partly because we are inundated with stories claiming to

be true and

theories proclaiming that truth does not exist. The response to those

who point out

distortions and omissions is usually some version of the truism that

all movies distort,

omit and simplify. This axiom, which can be applied to novels — and

even, to some

extent, to biographies — is assumed to be where the discussion ends.

But that is where

the discussion should begin.

 

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