Troubled mind

With A Beautiful Mind, director Ron Howard (Apollo 13, Cocoon) and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (Batman and Robin, A Time to Kill) have produced a polished and carefully crafted piece of Hollywood glitter that seems intent on celebrating (to borrow from Faulkner) humanity's ability "not merely to endure, but to prevail." The sojourner in question is John Forbes Nash Jr., a real man and acclaimed mathematician. Nash was born in West Virginia in 1928, attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and ended up at Princeton in the late 1940s, exhibiting all the intellectual promise of a man who might someday change the way we view the world. (He believed strongly in something called "governing dynamics.")

But Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. This led to years of anguish and confinement in psychiatric hospitals, where he received both drug and shock therapy to help burn the corrosion off his once "beautiful mind." The somewhat happy ending of this painful story is that Nash, who is still alive and working at Princeton, learns to live with his illness, and even wins the Nobel Prize for economics for groundbreaking work in game theory he formulated as a graduate student.

Anyone who has charted the course of this well-received Oscar-hopeful is aware that the filmmakers played fast and loose with many of the facts of Nash's life. (The movie is based on the 1998 biography by Sylvia Nasar.) Goldsman (who spent ten years working with emotionally disturbed children before turning to moviemaking) defends his script by saying that "the sheer act of omission is creation," and besides, it was never meant to be a "bio-pic" (Hollywoodese for a straight biographical version of a person's life).