As a follow-up to last night’s post about the relevance of historical accuracy in movies, I thought that I would post the following, an article from this morning’s New York Times‘ Arts section:
A ‘Mind’ Is a Hazardous Thing to Distort
By A. O. SCOTT
To anyone who has read “A Beautiful Mind,” Sylvia Nasar’s biography of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., the past few weeks have been mind-boggling.
The book, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner published in 1998, was loosely adapted by Akiva Goldsman and Ron Howard into the film, which was nominated for eight Oscars. It has also become, in recent weeks, the subject of a curiously nasty entertainment-industry dust-up.
Gossip columnists have trumpeted a series of “revelations” about Mr. Nash that seem to undermine the movie’s view of him, and these tidbits – involving homosexuality, anti-Semitism and the fathering of an illegitimate child – have been taken as evidence of a smear campaign by rival studios looking to win the best-picture statue for their own offerings. As the charges swirled around the movie, Mr. Nash and his wife, Alicia, appeared on “60 Minutes” to deny all the allegations.
It is surely dismaying to Ms. Nasar’s readers – as it clearly is to the author herself, who has taken strong exception to the recent articles – to see her scrupulous and sensitive biography used to tar its subject with innuendo.
That said, the movie – with a very different purpose from these statements about Mr. Nash and in a way that is by no means morally or artistically equivalent – also simplifies and distorts the complex and fascinating life presented in the book.
The smears should not automatically excuse the movie for its own inaccuracies. The decision to change a true story – to delete material that may confuse or disturb viewers, to telescope chronology, to insert composite or entirely fictional characters into historical events – is as much an artistic (and therefore an ethical) choice as the casting of a certain actor or the selection of a camera angle. And such choices are the basis of critical judgment.
At issue, it seems to me, is not literal accuracy but credibility. Real life is messy, and the human character is often contradictory and hard to read. Movies – large-scale, commercially ambitious Hollywood movies in particular – prefer clear story lines and unambiguous emotions. They would rather uplift than challenge or disturb.
It is hardly news that a great deal of difficult material from the book was left out of the film version of “A Beautiful Mind.” Nowhere does Ms. Nasar, a former economics reporter for The New York Times, say that Mr. Nash is a bigot, a homosexual or a bad father. But she documents the paranoid delusions caused by his schizophrenia, some of which caused him to lash out against Jews; his intense friendships with men (characterized by one colleague as “romantic”); and his relationship with Eleanor Stiers, with whom he was involved before he married Alicia Larde, and with whom he had a son. Mr. Goldsman, the screenwriter, and Mr. Howard, the director, made no secret of the liberties they had taken with their source, and a number of reviewers (including me) objected to some of those liberties.
At the bookstores that share mall space with the multiplexes showing “A Beautiful Mind,” you will find prominently displayed copies of Ms. Nasar’s book (with Russell Crowe’s picture on the cover). You can document the discrepancies between book and movie yourself and decide whether they matter.
My opinion, as I have made clear at some length, is that they do. All the movie-industry spin and counterspin has drowned out an important argument, not only about “A Beautiful Mind” but about how faithful movies should be to the reality they depict and how far they can stray from the historical record.
Two years ago, “The Hurricane” – Norman Jewison’s film about the imprisonment and eventual vindication of Rubin Carter, known as Hurricane, the boxer who was convicted for murder – was criticized for slighting the lawyers who had worked to free him. The intervention of a young African-American boy and his guardians seemed to make a better story, as did the invention of a racist New Jersey policemen (played by Dan Hedaya) who pursued Denzel Washington’s Carter like Javert chasing Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables.”
The transgression in that case – as in the cases of “J.F.K.” and “Mississippi Burning” before it – was not against biography but against history. The character played by Mr. Hedaya is a familiar Hollywood archetype: the lone white racist who exists to soothe the consciences of the white audience with the fiction that racism is caused by maladjusted individuals, rather than by systemic injustice. A difficult passage in American history was thus smoothed over and made palatable and familiar. Something similar happens to the cold war in “A Beautiful Mind,” in which the paranoia and uncertainty of McCarthy-era academic life is reduced to spy-movie clichés.
This kind of simplification is in some ways more troubling than the fudging or forgetting of the details of Mr. Nash’s life, like his divorce or his arrest for indecent exposure. In the treatment of the story’s intellectual and political context, the choices Mr. Goldsman and Mr. Howard have made misrepresent something larger than a single man’s experience.
The brouhaha over “A Beautiful Mind” replays an argument that has become an award-season ritual. But if the arguments seem predictable, they are nonetheless important, partly because it is impossible to formulate a general rule of cinematic accuracy, and partly because we are inundated with stories claiming to be true and theories proclaiming that truth does not exist. The response to those who point out distortions and omissions is usually some version of the truism that all movies distort, omit and simplify. This axiom, which can be applied to novels – and even, to some extent, to biographies – is assumed to be where the discussion ends. But that is where the discussion should begin.
Something to think about. I just thought that I would pass it along.
Peace.
