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Fact, fiction, simplification — Hollywood style
C. RAMMANOHAR REDDY
Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly in "A Beautiful Mind".
HOLLYWOOD tells a very good story. That, unfortunately, can be a problem when the story is of a life actually lived. Or when a film tackles mental illness. The desire to provide upliftment and make people feel good - which is what Hollywood is very good at — takes priority over making audience think about disturbing issues.
"A Beautiful Mind", the film of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash's struggle with schizophrenia won the Oscar for the best picture of the year. It did so in spite of a smear campaign against its interpretation of Sylvia Nasar's sensitive biography of the same name. The film moves you with its presentation of the life of Nash, his triumph over schizophrenia and, most of all, the support of his wife. But reflect a bit and read a little and you realise that the film has cheated you. "A Beautiful Mind" has been criticised for glossing over Nash's alleged anti-Semitism, for ignoring his relationship with a woman by whom he had a son before he married Alicia Larde and for not mentioning his 1954 arrest for indecent exposure. It has also been faulted for portraying "delusions" which were never part of Nash's own illness. Some of this criticism is unfair. A certain amount of invention is acceptable, especially when the film wants to convey what goes on in a person's mind. A certain amount of abstraction may even be necessary. While a description and discussion of every important detail in a person's life may make a biography very absorbing, their portrayal on the screen would make a film unbearably long.
However, facts are still important when they are germane to the story. And this is where the film first fails. It does not matter, for instance, if the movie does not refer to the anti-Semitic remarks Nash made during his illnesses. What does matter is the omissions that would have given the audience a more complete picture of the young Nash. The film portrays the young Nash as a genius, whose eccentricities are, therefore, acceptable. But in his youth, before the onset of schizophrenia, Nash was a snob, obsessed with class and believed in racial superiority. This is apparent from the Nasar biography (p. 82, 180-181 and 218 of the 2002 Touchstone edition). Notions of social superiority almost surely persuaded Nash to not marry Eleanor Stier, the mother of his first son who was "only" a nurse and did not speak with the right accent (p. 218-219).
There is a second set of omissions, which border more on misrepresentation. The movie is as much about Alicia's love for Nash during his illness as it is about his own struggle. Yet, what we are not told is that Nash's wife, exhausted and fearful, divorced him three years after the onset of schizophrenia. While his former wife continued to help, support to Nash during some of his most bleakest periods (1967-70) came from his sister and mother, who was then over 70 (p. 398-408). Both are nowhere in the film. Such events do not diminish the bonds between husband and wife (they married a second time, 25 years later) but they do suggest a life much more complicated than the one on screen.
It is perhaps for these reasons that both the film's director, Ron Howard, and the author of the screenplay, Akiva Goldsman, have said that the film never pretended to be a biopic, that Nash is "a symbol" for "a human journey", and that it is a film "inspired by John and Alicia — true but not factual". This is where the third set of problems emerges. This portrayal of one person's triumph over schizophrenia is so appealing because, we are told, it is based on a real life. It is unlikely that the film would have been half as successful if it had been about a fictional character. The movie is not afraid to extract the maximum mileage from "truth". The dates in the subtitles throughout the film like "Princeton 1949", "MIT 1954" and finally "Stockholm 1994" (the biggest fiction in the film, the speech that Nash never gave at the Nobel awards) feed the appeal of the film to the audience, which is unaware that much of the film never happened.
The fourth and biggest problem is Hollywood's penchant for simplification of issues. The dark side of mental illness can never be box office cinema, it is only the human triumph that makes a good story. So why not make everything so simple — a matter of just love and voluntary effort? Hence the focus in the film on the bonds between John Nash and Alicia Larde, hence the use of treacly symbols like a handkerchief of Alicia's that Nash carries for more than four decades. You only have to compare the presentation of Nash's struggle in "A Beautiful Mind" with Kay Jamieson's story of her struggle with manic depression in her book, An Unquiet Mind to realise the difference. Both are stories of triumphs over mental illness. But one stays with you because of its honesty and courage in addressing complex and disturbing issues. The other is just a pretty picture of one kind that you leave behind at the theatre. May be the problem is, unfortunately again, with cinema. A movie can never tell a story about a life of mental illness the way the written word can.
E-mail the writer at crr100@india.com
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