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Film of the Week: 'A Beautiful Mind'
By Steve Sailer
UPI National Correspondent
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=03012002-064117-4994r</A>
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- "A Beautiful Mind," which goes into wide
release
on Friday, is supposedly based on Sylvia Nasar's excellent biography of
mathematician John F. Nash, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia
from
1959 until only a few years before he received the Nobel Prize in 1994.
It's a well-acted and heart-warming movie. Yet, as an apparent
frontrunner
for the Best Picture Oscar, "A Beautiful Mind" demands more scrutiny
than
critics have so far given it. Ultimately, it reveals less about the
delusions
of its purported subject than it does about the delusions of the modern
hack
screenwriter.
Akiva Goldman (writer of "Batman & Robin" and other widely despised
movies)
teams with the consistently competent director Ron Howard ("The Grinch")
to
tell audiences what they want to hear about there being only a thin line
between genius and madness. "You shouldn't feel bad about not being a
genius," the movie implies, "At least, hey, loony bin orderlies don't
have to
strap you down for your own protection." As one of Tolstoy's characters
noted, "No one is satisfied with his wealth, but everyone is satisfied
with
his intelligence."
In reality, although many great minds are eccentric and some are
manic-depressive, very few are schizophrenic. Nasar calls Nash the
"tragic
exception" to this rule. Nash was the rare prodigy who had already
proven his
genius before he began hearing from space aliens at the age of 30.
A decade earlier in 1948, Nash had arrived at Princeton to get his Ph.D.
Princeton was then home to legendary thinkers such as Robert Oppenheimer
and
John von Neumann, heroes who had helped win World War II and were deeply
involved in the Cold War. The movie, though, only alludes to this
glamorous
community. Unaccountably, it doesn't even show us the time Nash barged
in on
Albert Einstein to lecture the "Man of the Century" on how to fix his
Theory
of Relativity.
Goldman's script misleadingly portrays the young Nash as being a loner
to the
point of autism. Computer scientist John McCarthy, the co-founder of
artificial intelligence, knew Nash at both Princeton and MIT. McCarthy
told
me, "Nash was arrogant and perhaps selfish, but he functioned in
society. He
came to the afternoon tea almost every day. He and I played practical
jokes
on each other."
At age 21, Nash wrote up his Nobel idea about game theory. He formally
showed
how, even without a government to set rules, a small number of business
rivals could reach a stable solution that would benefit each. This
didn't
refute the free-market economics of Adam Smith, as the movie claims, but
extended them.
Cold War military planners instantly appreciated Nash's contribution.
Although often derided as Dr. Strangelove, the RAND Corporation's
nuclear
strategists saw in the "Nash equilibrium" hope that there could be a
stable
middle ground between nuclear war and surrendering to Stalin.
After a decade of brilliance, Nash suddenly broke down in 1959.
Goldman throws out most of these facts in order to force feed us the
anti-anti-communist propaganda so popular among modern screenwriters
obsessed
with Hollywood's blacklisting of their Stalinist predecessors. ("The
Majestic," currently bombing at a theatre near you, displays the same
fixation.)
In Goldman's hallucination, it is McCarthy-era paranoia that drives Nash
mad.
There's no mention of the extraterrestrial and religious delusions that
primarily troubled the real Nash. Instead, Goldman's Nash goes bonkers
worrying about Soviet spies. Since Nash was quite sane until 1959, long
after
Senator McCarthy's demise, Goldman moves Nash's breakdown up to
McCarthy's
heyday in 1953.
The other problem with "A Beautiful Mind" is that casting Russell Crowe
("Gladiator") as a twenty-year-old whiz kid is rather like having John
Goodman star in the life story of jockey Willie Shoemaker.
First, the 37-year-old Crowe probably hasn't looked like he was 20 since
he
was 16.
F
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