In the runup to the Academy Awards this year, Ron Howard’s film,
A Beautiful Mind, caught a remarkable fusillade of
criticism from various Cassandras ranging from Matt Drudge to
Andrew Sullivan. With the film now released on DVD and video, it’s
worth reviewing the controversy.
The movie, a “biopic” adapted from the Sylvia Nasar biography of
Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash (Simon & Schuster,
1998), “left out” important things, the critics said. It did not
describe a homosexual affair Nash had apparently had as a young
man. Late in the mud-slinging, Drudge dredged up accusations
(against the real Nash) of anti-Semitism. One wonders if the
critics actually read the book. The movie leaves out a whole lot
else.
More important, screenwriting is all about what you leave
out.
Nash had a number of what might be called “gay affairs,” but
that would be stretching it. They were, more accurately, desperate
neurotic lurches driven by terminal geekiness, a near-autistic
inability to relate to other people. It is unclear whether Nash
ever consummated any of these fumbles. One such included an
unbidden crawl into a 15-year-old boy’s bunk — what would today be
called an assault. And in 1954, Nash pulled a George Michael in a
Santa Monica beach restroom and got busted. The local cops turned
him over to their pals in the security department of the RAND
Corporation, where Nash was doing top secret work. RAND fired him,
and told him to get out of Dodge.
Before that, in Boston in 1952, Nash had begun an affair with a
woman, Eleanor Stier, who was older than he. By the following year,
Eleanor was pregnant, and gave birth to a son, John David Stier.
Nash, a snob about social status, looked down on the working-class
Eleanor and never gave the slightest hint he might marry her.
Indeed, he abused her and his son by neglect for years. Nash’s
cruelty in these two relationships is almost beyond description.
Nash married Alicia, the wife pictured in the film, some years
later, and had another son, also named John — as though the first
son did not even exist.
One way or another, the critics raised most of those
“omissions.” But for a screenwriter, that’s just part of the
unwieldy territory. There’s more.
John Nash worked in a milieu — higher mathematics — beyond the
understanding of, literally, 99 percent of the population. For most
people, mathematics means arithmetic. I got a 650 on the math SAT
in 1965, when the scores really meant something, and I could not
follow a single mathematical proof or example in the book, A
Beautiful Mind. That was the daily stuff of life for Nash. How
do you represent his work?
And how do you represent his professional life? Nash worked in a
loosely knit, but devoted, community of perhaps 200 mathematicians
and academicians, the best in the world, many of them with
incomprehensible (to a movie audience) foreign names — all of them
working on ideas that set them completely apart from the rest of
the world.
When Nash went nuts — he succumbed to schizophrenia in his
twenties, which ruined him for decades — he fell into bizarre
fantasizing that included anti-Semitic world conspiracies, crackpot
numerology, and a determined attempt to renounce his identity, even
his citizenship, as an American. He abandoned his wife and son (the
legitimate wife and son, that is; the illegitimate pair he had long
ago renounced) and bounced around the world for years. Alicia
divorced him, though they did stay together, after a fashion. For a
screenwriter, the geography alone is crazy-making.
So: You’re a screenwriter, you look at this material, and you
know certain things. You know that if you’re going to work with a
hot movie star (Russell Crowe), if you’re going to have that movie
star play a hero, there are certain things you cannot do. You
cannot make him an abuser of woman and children, an anti-Semite, or
a weenie-wagger. You cannot present the abstractions of
mathematics, not really, to a general audience. You cannot let your
story get hijacked by politically loaded revisionist emotionalisms,
like the gay agenda. You absolutely cannot show the worst of
schizophrenia, which is not romantic, but heartbreaking, even
disgusting. Childhood? Back story? Forget about it — no time.
Here’s how you focus: You’ve got one of the great mathematical
geniuses ever, who at a young age develops a theory at first poorly
understood, but which later becomes pivotally important in
economics. He goes crazy, so crazy he loses everything. But his
friends and his wife stick by him because, as one of those friends
says, “He was worth doing the very best for.” His colleagues
eventually let him hang around Princeton, being crazy, being “The
Phantom,” as he was known in those years. And eventually, through
something like grace, Nash comes out of it. (Few schizophrenics
do.) He gets a handle on delusional thought, and puts himself back
together. And right about that time, the world as a whole
recognizes him with the grandest prize of all, the Nobel.
That’s the story: Redemption through grace. Anything that gets
in the way of that, you leave out. You leave out the illegitimate
son and neglected mistress, you pare down the cast to a half-dozen
important colleagues, you forget about any locations except
Princeton and MIT. Scratch the divorce. You make up a hallucinatory
filmic language to convey both Nash’s genius and his insanity, even
going so far as to create three wholly imaginary characters to
people Nash’s delusions. You stick with the friendship, the
support, the love, and the ultimate triumph.
You keep the true emotion, and you keep the emotion true. You
don’t hurt the book; the book is still there, for anyone who wants
to read it. You don’t do anything cheap. And if you are a wonderful
filmmaker like Ron Howard, you make the best biopic since Pride
of the Yankees.
