Hollywood's version a beautiful lie

When you watch a film about a real-life schizophrenic, how do you know it's real? ANDREW LAXON on A Beautiful Mind.

John Nash, tortured mathematical genius, writhes uncomfortably in his chair. From across the desk comes a long silence. His professor flips through the pages of Nash's last-minute attempt to redeem himself.

The signs are not good. So far in his time at Princeton University, Nash has arrogantly skipped all classes and ignored most of his textbooks as he searches for a truly original mathematical idea. Already he shows signs of paranoia and delusion: he chases pigeons, doodles on windows and allows his desk to be thrown out the window.

But inspiration arrives one night in a bar. Struck by the hopeless prospects of five men chasing one sexy blonde, he develops an unlikely mathematical theory that all-out competition does not always serve the common good.

Now he sits waiting nervously for the response that could make or break his career. His professor flips forward, back and forward again through the pages: "You do realise," he observes sharply, "that this overturns 150 years of economic theory?"

Nash nods. "Congratulations," smiles the professor, "with this under your belt, you could work just about anywhere."

Except it didn't really happen like that. Yes, John Forbes Nash, inspiration for the Oscar frontrunner A Beautiful Mind, developed a mathematical game theory along these lines (minus the blonde) which won him the Nobel Prize for economics almost 50 years later.

But he did not develop any of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia portrayed by Russell Crowe in this scene until at least 10 years later. When he completed his greatest work, he was fully sane - less dramatic than the film makes out but an important distinction for anyone dealing with schizophrenia.

And as the world's media have found out in the countdown to the Academy Awards, A Beautiful Mind takes other liberties with the life of the real Nash, who is still alive at 73 and co-operated with the film-makers.

The film traces Nash's life from his arrival at Princeton in 1947 to his Nobel Prize in 1994. Its sentimental message is that he overcomes his illness through sheer determination and the loving support of his patient wife, Alicia.

It ignores his alleged homosexual relationships in his 20s and a 1954 arrest for indecent exposure in a public toilet, an incident which gay rights activists believe outs him as a closet homosexual.

The film - directed by Hollywood's king of family values and happy endings, Ron Howard (Parenthood, Cocoon, Apollo 13), also skips over the fact that Nash had a baby with another woman. And that he and Alicia divorced and only remarried three years ago.

It makes no mention of his alleged racism and anti-Semitism. Nash once said that "the root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned, are Jews". His biographer, Sylvia Nasar, whose book A Beautiful Mind is the film's inspiration, notes that Nash was having delusions at the time.

Does all this matter? For a start, it could tip the balance either way this morning (NZ time) as the film makes a late run for best film. While Crowe has been talked about as a candidate for best actor for months, his movie has in the past week edged past Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring as favourite for best picture.

Success for either film could be worth millions. The Los Angeles Times says DVD sales for another Oscar contender, Moulin Rouge, jumped 160 per cent the week after its nomination.

So if A Beautiful Mind does well today, millions of filmgoers could be tempted to find out more about an obscure American mathematician with a serious illness. But after last week's revelations, many also wonder if they are seeing the real Nash or a sanitised Hollywood version, cleaned up and straightened out to make the film more palatable to family audiences and academy voters.

In the film's defence, this is exactly the line peddled by muck-raking internet sites such as the Drudge Report - allegedly fed by dirty tricks specialists from rival studios, who knew that sooner or later the mainstream media would overcome their scruples and pick up the story.

Matt Drudge, who pushed the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal into the public domain, began writing pieces such as "Nash 'Jew Bashing' Left Out of Film" at the time of the Golden Globe nominations in December.

The Los Angeles Times says an "Oscar consultant" for Miramax Films (in contention for best picture with In the Bedroom) promptly alerted reporters. The story was picked up by columnist Roger Friedman at the conservative Fox news network and in late February by the New York Post, which called Nash a "rabid anti-Semite". Suddenly the topic was everywhere.

Universal counter-attacked hard. Howard said he took the accusations personally and compared the alleged dirty tricks to the worst excesses of US presidential campaigns. (Miramax has since denied orchestrating the rumours and accused Universal of plugging for the sympathy vote. Both sides scrupulously avoid mentioning that many voters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are Jewish.)

Biographer Nasar wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times - hometown paper for academy voters - strongly rejecting claims that the film had tried to hide unsavoury aspects of Nash's life.

She said his anti-Semitic letter of 1967 occurred during an intense period of paranoid schizophrenia "when he felt himself not only threatened by Jews and the state of Israel but also believed himself to be Job, a slave in chains, the emperor of Antarctica and a Messiah".

She had uncovered his arrest for indecent exposure when researching the biography but never doubted he was heterosexual.

"While he had intense emotional relationships with other men in his 20s, no one I interviewed claimed, much less provided evidence, that Nash ever had sex with another man."

Nash, Alicia and their son John, who also suffers from schizophrenia, denied the claims on the CBS 60 Minutes programme. Even the film's Jewish screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, spoke up, telling the Jerusalem Post the smear campaign tried to exploit the "cultural self-protectiveness" of American Jews.

"We omitted Nash's childhood, his previous relationships with women, his dalliances with men and 100 other things in order to make people understand the suffering the disease entails."

But there may still be some fire behind the smoke. Time magazine's respected film critic Richard Corliss claims that Howard and his producer Brian Grazer had to pay Nash for rights to use his story. The deal, says Corliss, included a clause that he must not be portrayed as a homosexual because Nash insisted it was not true.

But most commentators seem to be lining up behind the film-makers. As the Independent's Los Angeles correspondent Andrew Gumbel put it: "So what if Ron Howard's movie doesn't mention the indecency arrest that got Nash dismissed from his regular stint of classified Government work at the Rand Corporation? The film doesn't make much of Nash's failure to resolve the Riemann Hypothesis on prime numbers, either, but nobody seems to be complaining about that."

Herald film critic Peter Calder agrees. Despite panning A Beautiful Mind as "a plodding sentimental piece of eyewash" in his review this month, he defends Howard's right to present a highly edited view of his life.

"People go to the movies to see stories that show struggle, catastrophe, recovery, triumph ... "I don't think the film has a responsibility to be comprehensively accurate about its subject's life unless it purports to be a documentary, which it doesn't."

For Calder, the film fails most seriously as attempted biography because it pretends Nash made his most brilliant discovery while in the grip of schizophrenia.

"It gives you the impression that madness - I use the term in a poetic sense - and brilliance are one and the same thing.

"The film depicts schizophrenia, which is a serious mental disease affecting a lot of people, as something that can be overcome by force of will and the love of a good woman.

"I think that's verging on irresponsible."

Maybe Ron Howard is having second thoughts too. The latest from Hollywood is that he is planning a scrupulously accurate historical remake of the Alamo siege of 200 Texans by a huge Mexican force in 1836. He has promised his remake will deal with historical complexities, include the Mexican point of view and examine facts glossed over in the 1960 John Wayne version.

He also said the film would deal with the darker side of the Alamo heroes - that means William Barret Travis' serial marital infidelities, Jim Bowie's slave trading, and Davy Crockett's overall political incorrectness.

Luckily for Howard, this time round all his main characters are dead.

nzherald.co.nz/oscars

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