>>>to me, it was eye opening to see that someone suffering from schizophrenia as as >highly functional as Nash was...& as innovatively brilliant...<<
I saw this copied into another post so I am saying off the bat I don't know the original poster nor the entire message. I'm only commenting on this one sentence. The acting by Crowe, as I said before, was wonderful. But, unfortunately, part of the highly santized version is that Nash was NOT highly functional. Don't let the movie fool you. Besides Nash's homosexuality, his "unfunctioning" was portrayed as something else. I don't think that paranoid schizophrenics do quite as well as Nash did in that movie. In full bloom of their illness, they stink, they are mean and vicious, they have trouble holding down a job, paying bills, maintaining relationships, raising chidren; the whole shooting match. Again, aside from being viewed as a slightly wacky dude who has a way with numbers, in no way did the movie show the smell, the violence, the betrayal and the suffering of someone with the disease and their loved, (or solicted one ;-D ), dealing with it. Nor the resulting stigma as others, (Colin, I think), have pointed out. It was grossly oversimplifying that Nash was able to just renew old ties and voila! He's back at Princeton with only some minor teasing by some minor doofuses. (doofusi?) Which then brings us to Bob Muller's statement that Ron Howard's job was to make a movie that made the producers and investors money. That is right on the...er....ah...money and bears a bit of expansion. It's made to make movie with the least possible risk and the most return. So it's a gross profit of xx% as opposed to a gross profit of yy% where XX is geater than YY and YY is the lower rate of return on the investment due to lower attendance becaues of weightier film depiction. I think it's still true that people go to movies to escape and while they are willing to see some "hard" truths, there's a limit. MG
