>TV WEEKEND | 'A BRILLIANT MADNESS' > > > > >The Man, Not the Legend, of 'A Beautiful Mind' > >By CARYN JAMES > >John Nash looks eminently professorial, with his tweedy brown jacket, gray >hair and wrinkled face. His voice is soft and deliberate, but what he says >is nothing like what you would hear from the average math professor. "I felt >like I might get a divine revelation by seeing a certain number; a great >coincidence could be interpreted as a message from heaven," he says, >describing the years of schizophrenic delusions that destroyed his career. >Then he smiles gently, as if amused by his former silliness. > >That smile is a rare and joyous sight. A reluctant interview subject, Mr. >Nash projects an image of great fragility in "A Brilliant Madness," an >hourlong documentary about his life. It is possible, of course, that a >viewer might be projecting that impression onto Mr. Nash, whose amazing >story is now well known. Winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic >Science is nothing next to having Russell Crowe play you in a movie that >wins the Oscar for best picture of the year. > >The title "A Brilliant Madness" bluntly echoes the film's, "A Beautiful >Mind," but that wasn't always the case. The documentary's working title was >"John Nash: Dark Side of Genius" (an early news release still called it >that), and the change reflects how much this work needs to be seen as a >companion piece to both the film, an eloquent and dazzling bit of Hollywood >moviemaking, and to Sylvia Nasar's discerning, vivid, lucid biography (also >called "A Beautiful Mind"). All are parts of the puzzle of Mr. Nash's public >persona. > >"A Brilliant Madness" is the least of the three. Marred by tacky >re-creations and visual clich�s, it truly comes to life only when Mr. Nash >is on screen. But even this slight documentary becomes fascinating because >the story is so miraculous. A great thinker as a young man, John Forbes Nash >Jr. spent decades of his middle age as a pathetic, unemployed figure who >haunted the Princeton campus and was known as the Phantom. Gradually he >regained his mental stability and in 1994 won the Nobel in economic science >for work he had done as a graduate student. > >The early stage of Mr. Nash's "strange and tragic metamorphosis" (as the >narrator, Liev Schreiber, calls it) is captured in a photograph taken at a >New Year's Eve costume party in 1958 when he was on the faculty of M.I.T. He >wore only a diaper and a sash, had a baby bottle in his mouth and spent most >of the night sitting on the lap of his pretty young wife. "Even to those >used to his eccentricities, it was a disturbing scene," Mr. Schreiber says. >Soon he believed he was on the cover of Life magazine disguised as the pope. > >The documentary includes information the movie was criticized for glossing >over. It deals with Mr. Nash's sporadic contact with an illegitimate son >from an earlier relationship, and with his divorce from Alicia Nash. They >later lived together companionably for years and remarried in 2001. > >And "A Brilliant Madness" offers something positive that most accounts of >Mr. Nash's life do not: an explanation of why his prize-winning contribution >to game theory, known as the Nash equilibrium, was so important. In "A >Beautiful Mind," his thought process is dazzlingly captured in a scene in >which the fictional Nash figures out the optimal way for him and his friends >to pick up a group of women. His idea is that each game player will act in >his own best interest, choosing what is best based on what he thinks the >other players will do. > >Paul A. Samuelson, another Nobel economic prize winner, makes the real-life >application understandable in the documentary. "Mergers, strikes, collective >bargaining � these situations of conflict and cooperation are part of the >backbone of practical economics," he says. Or as a newspaper headline shown >on screen says of Mr. Nash, "His ideas apply to poker and to world trade." > >When it turns to the darkest aspects of Mr. Nash's mental illness and >treatment, though, "A Brilliant Madness" becomes lurid. It begins with a >shadowy night scene in which a man is led away by two policemen, the police >car's lights swirling. A reenactment of Mr. Nash's being taken to a mental >hospital � the first of several involuntary stays � the scene has a >surprising resemblance to the cheesy Fox show "Cops." Eventually we see >close-ups of a nurse's white shoes walking ominously down a corridor. > >In the works for a year and a half, "A Brilliant Madness" shows the signs of >its hemmed-in conception. Because Universal Pictures owned the rights to the >story and to the Nasar book, the documentary's producers agreed that their >work would not be shown before the Academy Awards. They interviewed Mr. and >Mrs. Nash last fall, before the movie was released. > >Since then, the Nashes have shown up quietly at the Academy Awards. They >have been interviewed by Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes," addressing >up-to-the-minute issues like fame and the nasty Oscar campaign against the >movie in which rumors spread that Mr. Nash was anti-Semitic. (Denying any >anti-Semitism, Mr. Nash told "60 Minutes" that he had "certain strange >ideas" that were the product of his delusional thoughts.) > >Some of "A Brilliant Madness" has been superseded by these recent events, >yet it becomes compelling whenever Mr. Nash appears. His presence, scattered >throughout the hour, creates a touching sense of him as a person instead of >as a newly minted pop legend. And his comments resonate with a tentative, >complicated sense of his life, not with the resounding triumph of a >Hollywood ending. > >"To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity," he says. "People are >always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. >But it's really not so simple. I think mental illness or madness can be an >escape also." He gave up that escape in the 80's, he says, not because his >visions disappeared but because "I began rejecting them and deciding not to >listen." > >Although "A Brilliant Madness" is at times more nuanced and factual than "A >Beautiful Mind," it would be a mistake to use the documentary to bludgeon >the movie. The news that Hollywood tampers with facts in the interest of a >good story is up there with the rediscovery of the wheel; documentaries have >their own sketchiness and attitudes, and sometimes Hollywood gets things >right even when it glosses over facts. > >As she was in "A Beautiful Mind," Alicia Nash is the heroine of "A Brilliant >Madness." When she took in her ex-husband after their divorce, giving him a >home and stability, she saved him. As Ms. Nasar says here, "The fact that >people did not abandon him, that there were people who treated him like a >human being, made it possible for him to re-emerge." Sometimes what seems >like pure Hollywood sentiment happens to be true.
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