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This week's Golden Globe awards increased the chances that Ron Howard's film about John Forbes Nash Jr., A Beautiful Mind, will be this year's big winner at the Oscars. (Film Forum covered critical responses to the film a few weeks ago.)

While both the Golden Globes and the Oscars tend to reward crowd-pleasers over fine art, I feel compelled to voice a few reservations about this year's favored title. Sure, it tells an inspiring story. But is it, as it claims, based on a "true story"?

Nash, a Nobel prize-winning genius whose theories have altered Wall Street and changed how we understand mathematics, has won international fame in spite of a severe struggle with schizophrenia that tested his relationships. Beautiful Mind captures the madness of schizophrenia vividly, painting Nash's life as a long, arduous, but ultimately triumphant battle against his mental affliction. The movie credits much of his recovery to the power of true love. We see Nash, awkward and reluctant in romance, finally gaining confidence as a lover and husband in the arms of Alicia, a persistent, attractive young student (Globe-winning Jennifer Connelly). Their marriage weathers the tempests of Nash's maddening spells, giving the film its predictably soaring conclusion. Audiences are deeply moved, and many tissues are deployed

True-story movies almost always alter the facts for the sake of condensing events to a coherent storyline. But A Beautiful Mind is so far from the truth that it seems a crime they didn't change the names. It may tell an inspiring, predictable story not unlike a TV movie of the week, but it certainly isn't Nash's story.

In the film, we see Nash as reluctant and awkward. Alicia is the one who finally gets through to him. But the film leaves out the widely-reported homosexual activity of Nash's college days. It avoids any mention of the fact that he got a woman pregnant, then abandoned her and the child he fathered. His eventual marriage is represented in the film as resilient and triumphant. Nash's real wife divorced him.

Wait, there's more. The hallucinations that Nash suffers in the film are pure Hollywood. We see Nash convinced that he's working with CIA operatives in an effort to save the U.S. from a nuclear threat. We are impressed at how Nash's affliction brings out his patriotism. The real Nash was more a skeptic than a patriot. And his real struggles with schizophrenia had him believing far more outrageous things: aliens had contacted him and told him he was to go to Europe and declare himself "the Prince of Peace." Wow. The John Nash of the film humbly accepts his Nobel Prize and gives an inspiring speech about how love has saved him from these exciting visions. But the real John Nash spoke about how he didn't think freedom from his madness was really such a good thing. He actually voiced regrets about getting better.

John Nash's life would certainly make an interesting movie. Maybe someone will make that movie someday. It might not be such a crowd-pleaser. Nash would appear a far more complicated, reckless, and difficult person. He might not have appeared the patriotic, sanitized hero that makes audiences cheer and film industry workers vote for Ron Howard's movie.

But the thing that frustrated this moviegoer the most: Why aren't we shown anything about his "beautiful mind"? Can you imagine if the movie Ali had focused on Mohammed Ali's political controversies without showing any boxing? Or if Amadeus had shown us Mozart's poverty without playing any of his music? A Beautiful Mind is so concerned with showing us emotional breakdowns and teary-eyed epiphanies that it fails to explain what was so special about Nash's brain. We hear that his theories revolutionized the way people invest. How? What in the world did he discover or do? Ron Howard is content to show Nash staring at millions of digits looking for patterns, and that's it. Big deal. When Nash wins his prize, we don't know why he's won it.

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January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46