 | A Beautiful Mind: Encyclopedia II - A Beautiful Mind - Fictionalized nature of film
A Beautiful Mind - Fictionalized nature of film
The movie should not be regarded as a biography of Nash, nor as a film version of Nasar's book. It is a drama inspired by the life of John Nash.
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman stated in an interview [1]:
I was reasonably absurd in my approach. I don't know how to write a bio-pic and this was one of the best researched scholarly biographies I'd ever read. Instead I wanted to use my understanding of what I'd read with additional research to evoke the grander beats of John's life. I didn't want it to be literal. I wanted to take stab at the truth of John's life, but not by way of the facts.
Goldsman brought to the script his life experience as the son of child psychologist Mira Rothenberg, who maintained a group home for emotionally disturbed children in the family's residence. Goldsman said that his goal was "to use [the story of John Nash's] journey to give some insight into what it might feel like to suffer from this disease." It can be inferred that Goldsman's priority was conveying the truth of the inner experience of schizophrenia, rather than the documenting the factual data of John Nash's life.
Critics argue that the movie glosses over his alleged homosexual relationships, his anti-semitic statements, his abandoning a woman shortly after fathering a child with her, and that it rewrites his actual psychotic experience (eg. being "attacked by Napoleon" or being "the left foot of God") into a more exciting but fictional account. The producers of the film argue that the claims of Nash's relationships with men are unverified and that Nash himself continues to deny that he is homosexual. The producers claim that they omitted the anti-semitic remarks because they did not serve the story. Nash himself has argued that although he did make these comments, he was extremely mentally ill at the time.
The movie also misrepresents the effect Nash's mental illness had on his work. The movie depicts Nash as already suffering from schizophrenia when he wrote his doctoral thesis. In reality, Nash's schizophrenia did not appear until years later and once it did his mathematical work ceased until he was able to bring it under control.
Many of the specific incidents and life events depicted in the movie do not correspond to anything mentioned in Nasar's biography. "There are many discrepancies between the book and the film," says a Nash FAQ on the Princeton website [2]. For example, the pen ceremony "was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists." The scene in which Nash thanks his wife Alicia during his Nobel prize acceptance speech is fictitious; Nobel prize winners do not give acceptance speeches, and Nash was not invited to give the traditional Nobel lecture due to concerns about his illness.
The plot of the movie makes much of Alicia Nash's unwavering devotion to her husband. In reality, the Nashs divorced in 1963 and lived apart for several years. In 1970, Alicia allowed John to live in her house but it was not a romantic relationship. It was not until the 1990s, when John was recovering from his mental illness, that their romantic relationship was revived and the couple remarried in 2001.
The scene in which Nash demonstrates to his girlfriend his ability to find any specified pattern in a starry sky does not correspond to anything in the book; nor does the scene in which Nash's infant son almost drowns because he believes that his hallucinatory colleague Charles is taking care of him; nor Nash having delusions of a password-generating device being implanted in his arm; nor the scene in which Nash realizes that Marcee must be imaginary because she has not aged, or the heartrending scene in which he bids farewell to her.
Other related archives1998, 1999, 2001, Adapted Screenplay, Akiva Goldsman, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Makeup, Best Picture, Brian Grazer, Cinderella Man, Department of Defense, Directing, DreamWorks, Economics, FAQ, Film Editing, Hollywood, James Horner, Jennifer Connelly, John Nash, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Men in Black, Mike Hill, National Book Critics Circle Award, New York Times, Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize for Economics, Original Music Score, Oscars, Princeton University, Pulitzer Prize, Ron Howard, Russell Crowe, Screenwriter, Soviet, Supporting Actress, Sylvia Nasar, The Pentagon, United States Department of Defense, Universal Pictures, anti-semitic, antipsychotic, biography, book, child psychologist, crack, delusion, encryption, film, game theory, girlfriend, governing dynamics, hallucinating, homosexual, interview, mathematical economics, mathematician, mathematics, mental illness, negative side-effects, paranoid, pattern, psychiatric facility, psychotic, roommate, schizophrenia, sky, starry, website
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Fictionalized nature of film", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
