A Beautiful Mind
2001
The life of the mathematics genius John Forbes Nash, A Beautiful Mind started out as a 1998 biography written by the American journalist Sylvia Nasar that totted up a decidedly ugly life: infidelity, divorce, predatory homosexuality, anti-Semitic outbursts, 25 years of obscurity in the grip of acute schizophrenia . . .
Then Hollywood got to work. Three years later, its director Ron Howard released his film version — and the only thing left was the schizophrenia.
The result was the most successful “disease of the week” movie since Rain Man: clever, classy, tasteful, emotionally wrenching, visually stunning and pure baloney.
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It pleased the masses and the Academy voters, winning multiple Oscars, but outraged the sticklers for historical and medical accuracy. Howard explained that Nash’s gay forays were excluded to avoid the PC minefield of associating homosexuality with mental illness and because they didn’t fit in with the film’s theme. (The theme is “wifely love triumphs over all”, so no surprise there.)
But to be fair, Nash has always denied being bisexual and said that his anti-Semitism appeared only in the depths of his illness. So it is probably best to accept that Hollywood biopics always sanitise their subjects’ lives and move on from the omissions in A Beautiful Mind to the additions.
Some of these are obvious inventions to make things more cinematic. The hallucinations and imaginary friends that Nash (played by Russell Crowe) experiences are pure artistic licence. In real life, all his delusions were auditory.
Likewise the standing-ovation finale, in which Nash praises his wife, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) and the “equations of love” after collecting his Nobel Prize for Economics, never happened. He shared the prize with two others and was not invited to make a speech because of concerns about his condition.
The finale is a comforting uplifting ending typical of Ron Howard and his regular scriptwriter, Akiva Goldsman, and horribly contrived. (Cinderella Man, 2005, their next collaboration — also with Crowe — delved even further into the candy jar of banal wish-fulfilment.)
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But in the middle of A Beautiful Mind the fictional reshaping is a different story, explaining the “clever” adjective above. In real life, Nash completed his seminal mathematical work before his illness took hold, which happened when he was 30. It was a tragic event but not inherently dramatic. In the film he grows mentally unstable while he is still working on his theories, creating instant tension over whether he will complete his work or go mad.
The film strings things along with various red herrings and an espionage decoding subplot, which are either knock-out twists or cheap tricks, depending on your taste. But once Nash is forced to admit his delusions, it paves the way for that most effective of dramatic situations, the real dilemma.
Nash discovers his new medication is effective, but dulls his ability to work properly. He therefore has to decide between medicated ineffectiveness or volatile creativity. It is a great choice to force on a hero because either one will cost him dearly.
Finally, he chooses to come off the pills without telling his wife, restoring some of the early moral texture to his character. (He first arrives at Princeton University arrogant and blunt, as well as socially maladroit.) It is a decision that leads to a worse situation, where he leaves his baby boy in the bath thinking his best friend is watching him. Nash wife’s barely saves the boy and we discover that the best friend is also imaginary.
Once again, Nash has to choose between delusion and reality at the urging of his wife, but alas this is where that dreaded Howard touch returns — and what seems like deep drama is really just a comfortingly simple problem.
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His wife offers to explore different styles of treatment to protect his intellect while his imaginary friends urge him to kill her. But the bottom line is if he doesn’t get help, he risks killing his baby, so it is not a real choice at all.
A Beautiful Mind, BBC One, Sunday (10.15pm)