Adapted from the book A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
Brilliant mathematician John Nash came up with some theorems that ultimately completely changed modern economics, but also suffered from schizophrenia.
I really can't summarize any better than that because the book and the movie are so completely different. If it weren't for the name John Nash and a few of the specific mathematical theorems, it wouldn't be immediately apparent that they were about the same man. The book is a fairly comprehensive biography. The author seems to have interviewed nearly everyone who ever knew Nash in order to include their observations and insights into his life. The movie, on the other hand, is mostly from Nash's perspective. Readers of the book see his illness the way people who knew Nash observed its affects on him; viewers of the movie experience it with him.
When I blogged about this movie during my Best Picture project (here), I didn't even want to mention his schizophrenia because it's such a plot twist. His delusions are presented as factual until suddenly he's in a mental hospital and surprise! A bunch of the characters aren't even real. In the book, though, from the very beginning allusions are made to his forthcoming psychotic breaks, so it definitely doesn't seem like a spoiler anymore. The movie makes his delusions much more coherent than they were described in the book. Although the things movie Nash says don't really make sense because the people he's talking about aren't really there, they still remain logical and easy to follow. In the book, he isn't described as having visual hallucinations at all; he does hear voices, but mostly he just has these feelings and ideas that he needs to do things like give up his passport or write letters to important people or go to Europe. The way they adapted this is a great example of making changes to suit a different medium. Trying to demonstrate what actually happened to Nash on screen would have been nearly impossible. Visual hallucinations, however, work very well in movies, and by showing things from his perspective, what could have been a dry biopic becomes a suspense thriller. So while this makes for a completely inaccurate portrayal of Nash's experiences, it also makes for a fascinating movie.
It's not just the details of his illness and the way it's conveyed to the audience that the movie changed; most of the other aspects of his life are completely different as well. Movie Nash is portrayed as very socially awkward, particularly around women, although he desperately wants to sleep with them. The author of the book, on the other hand, implies that Nash was really more attracted to men than to women, describing several homosexual romances. He also fathered a child with a woman whom he said he intended to marry but never did, choosing instead to marry Alicia - his only romantic interest in the movie. The film also neglects to mention that John and Alicia got divorced when he kept refusing treatment and became violent toward her and their son (who later also developed schizophrenia, another fact not mentioned in the film). Once Nash started behaving more rationally, he did move back in with Alicia, but at the time the book was published, they had not gotten remarried. Interestingly, they did remarry in 2001, and I have to wonder how much the movie coming out had to do with that. Anyway, obviously one wouldn't expect a feature film to go into all the sordid details of someone's life, but it was strange to go from a book about a man who pursued other men, and occasionally women, to a movie about a man who is very into women but clueless about how to find a mate. Hollywood straight-washing at its finest.
Coming up next: The Pianist, based on the memoir by Władysław Szpilman
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