Devlin's Angle

A Beautiful Portrayal and a Confused NYT Reviewer

Well, why did I say that? First, let me begin by repeating here the statements made by film director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman that I quoted last time.

Here is what director Howard wrote:

"[The movie] captures the spirit of the journey, and I think that it is authentic in what it conveys to a large extent. Certain aspects of it are dealt with symbolically. How do you understand what goes on inside a person's mind when under stress, when mentally ill, when operating at the highest levels of achievement. The script tries to offer some insight, but it's impossible to be entirely accurate. Most of what is presented in the script is a kind of synthesis of many aspects of Nash's life. I don't think it's outrageous.

We are using [Nash] as a figure, as a kind of symbol. We are using a lot of pivotal moments in his life and his life with Alicia as the sort of bedrock for this movie ... even though we are taking licence, we are trying to deal with it in a fairly authentic way so that an audience is transported and can begin to understand. But they can't begin to understand completely; they never could - no one could."

"[W]hat we're doing here is not a literal representation of the life of John Nash, it's a story inspired by the life of John Nash, so what we hope to do is evoke a kind of emotional journey that is reminiscent of the emotional journey that John and Alicia went through. In that sense, it's true - we hope - but it's not factual. For me, it was taking the architecture of his life, the high points, the low points, and then using that as a kind of wire frame, draping invented scenes, invented interactions in order to tell a truthful but somewhat more metaphoric story.

I think that to vet this by exposing it to historical accuracy is absurd. This movie is not about the literal moment-to-moment life of John Nash. It's an invention ... What we did is we used from his life what served the story we are trying to tell, which is why we are saying this is not a biopic. It could never bear up to that kind of scrutiny, it never wanted to, it never pretended to be a biopic. It always wanted to be a human journey, based on someone, inspired by someone's life."

Well, according to the movie review in the New York Times on December 21, "The paradox of Ron Howard's new film, from a script by Akiva Goldsman, is that the story ... is almost entirely counterfeit."

Well, duhh! Just fancy that. A fictional story that is entirely counterfeit. Whatever will they think of next!

Why on earth anyone should expect this film to be true to some particular person's life is beyond me. It's a film, after all. True, it was inspired by real events and uses some real people's names, but fictionalized novels, plays, and films involving "real" characters are hardly a new phenomenon. Does the New York Times reviewer find him (or her) self unable to enjoy Shakespeare's "historical" plays because of all that fake dialogue?

But the NYT reviewer is not alone in wanting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (gosh, what a dull movie that would be). As I mentioned already, following my NPR interview I've had a number of emails from mathematicians pointing out the historical inaccuracies and omissions from the film, and lamenting insufficient emphasis on the actual mathematics. I think the above quotes from Howard and Goldsman address the first complaint, and as for the second, I think we can gauge the overall level of interest in mathematics among the general population by the number of students who sign up for mathematics majors, which in recent years has dwindled almost to the point of vanishing. But the film is not about mathematics, and nor is this article. So, in true movie-Nash form, let's cut out the foreplay and come straight to the point.

First, let's be clear what this is. It's a film. That alone is too imprecise. It's like saying something is a book. Sure, but is it Tolstoy, Ed McBane, or D. A. Bayer's book on Calculus of Several Variables? (Hands up all those who have seen that classic text?)

A Beautiful Mind is a Hollywood blockbuster film, with a big budget, an accomplished director, a major star (Russell Crowe plays Nash), and a strong supporting cast of leading Hollywood actors (including Jennifer Connelly as Nash's wife Alicia, Christopher Plummer as the psychiatrist who treats him, and Ed Harris as the mysterious DoD agent Parcher).

This is a very different medium from an art film made for a select audience, or from a film biography designed to capture someone's life on celluloid. Sure the technologies they use are all similar (though less so than one might think), but then, at the technology level, all books are more or less the same.

A Hollywood blockbuster is meant to have wide appeal. It has to tell its story in a way that is powerful, compelling, and effective on a very large screen, with a great sound system. In this case, the audience can be expected to know nothing about mathematics (and I mean nothing, other than that it's "all about numbers"), about John Nash, or about what life was like in a leading research university in the 1950s.

Action movies aside, the main tools at the disposal of the Hollywood blockbuster director are visually powerful scenes, actors who can convey inner feelings with their eyes, their facial expression, and their body language - often when their face or just a part of their face fills the entire screen - crisper-than-life sound, and music. The genre works primarily at the level of human emotion. Any information conveyed has to be carried on the back of the emotional delivery system. The viewer has to bring the usual suspension of disbelief that goes with any form of fiction, and be prepared to be taken on the journey the director has created. (Incidentally, I have yet to see a convincing explanation of why we find watching movies or plays - watching other people pretending to be imaginary people, doing imaginary acts - an enjoyable activity for which we are willing to spend both time and money.)

The story Goldsman and Howard set out to tell is really classic: Two people fall in love and have to overcome incredible obstacles until they get to the happy ending. In this case, the man's brilliant start to life is derailed when he succumbs to severe paranoid schizophrenia. When, in part due to the development of new drugs, his illness goes into remission, he has to come to terms with the fact that much of his own reality for the best part of his adult life has been illusory. The woman, the young graduate student whom he marries, sticks by him throughout it all to the story's relatively happy end. (In real life, I always felt that the real hero of the real John Nash story is Alicia. Although they divorced when his illness was at its worst and she had a child to care for, she remained by him throughout his ordeal. The two remarried last summer.)

The device Howard uses to convey to the viewer the essence of the Nashes' ordeal is to put the audience into Nash's own predicament, inside his own mind. Much of what you see is not "real", it's a Nash illusion. Some of it is clearly of this nature (although some viewers seem to have missed that point, including the hapless New York Times movie reviewer, of whom more later). But other parts are not, and unless you are quick enough to spot the clues Howard puts in (and in many cases I only noticed them the second time I saw the film, when I knew what was coming later), you are surely going to be surprised at the way some of the later action unfolds.

Then, at the moment when Nash himself becomes aware of his predicament, the audience too has to start to think back, and ask, "Gee, just how much of what I've just seen was intended to be "real" and which parts were "Nash-hallucinations"?" Nash is not sure, and neither are we, the audience.

One of the plot lines Howard clearly intended the audience to see as taking place inside Nash's mind right from the start were the scenes relating to Nash's supposed defense work, particularly the scenes at the Pentagon and later with the Department of Defense, including his interactions with the mysterious Parcher. The entire tenor changes so dramatically for those scenes, from "reality drama" to over-the-top melodrama, that there should be no doubt that this is all going on inside an increasingly deranged mind. (The melodrama in those segments becomes greater as the movie progresses.) So, I don't think I'm giving anything away to those of you who have not yet seen the movie if I base the rest of this article on just that part of the story. There are still plenty of surprises in store that Howard clearly meant to keep hidden from us until the right time.

Surprisingly, not everyone who has seen the film seems to have realized what Howard was up to. Including some who one would have thought were past masters at understanding the medium of film. (Heavens, I'm just a simple mathematician who goes to movies purely for relaxation!)

Now, it is not the normal practice of Devlin's Angle to engage in intellectual sparring. But the self-appointed, self-important arbiters of artistic taste who grace the arts pages of the New York Times are surely fair game. So when one of them sets him (or her) self up with full grandeur and intellectual snobbery, and then falls flat on his (or her) face, making a complete fool of him (or her) self in print, the temptation is too good to pass up.

The reviewer in question is one A. O. Scott, (New York Times, December 21). Having berated the movie makers for not crediting the viewing audience with intelligence - always a dangerous ploy unless you are completely sure you have got everything right - Scott shows s/he has missed one of the main, pivotal, but hardly subtle, points of the movie. Alas, poor Scott is not alone in not realizing that the cold war scenes in the movie were all taking place in Nash's increasingly deranged mind. Scott writes:

More than a few mathematicians and scientists at the time, including many at M.I.T., where Nash went to teach after Princeton (not, as the film has it, to conduct top-secret defense-related research), were sympathetic to Communism, and many more ... were suspected of such sympathies. While Mr. Nash was not among them, he was hardly the intrepid cold warrior depicted by Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman.

Of course, there were more subtle clues. For example, whenever Nash looks out of his MIT office door, he (and we) see MPs guarding the entrance. But when we see anyone else open a door and look out at the same corridor, it's empty - just like a typical MIT corridor in fact. Hmmm. I wonder what that can mean?

When Parcher appears on the steps of MIT's Wheeler Lab to talk to Nash, he does just that: appears. We've just seen Nash leave by that door, and no one else was around, and then, presto, there is the mysterious Parcher, standing on the top step, clearly not having come through the door. (Even more subtle, Parcher's voice initially comes from the left of the screen, where Nash is standing, whereas Parcher appears toward the right. Nash hears the voice in his mind before he creates the image, and it takes a moment for his mind to match the two.)

There are a number of other such clues that Howard has created to make sure no one misses this major artifact of the movie.

Despite laying on the clues thickly with a large trowel, I guess Howard must have been worried that some viewers would still not "get it." Quite late in the film, Alicia (Nash's wife) visits Nash's two mathematical colleagues at MIT and asks them if her husband had been doing any military work. It is possible, one of them says skeptically, since MIT does after all do some military work, but they (Nash's two closest colleagues, remember) had never done any work of that nature and they were pretty sure Nash hadn't either. Indeed, they had been so sure something was wrong that one of them had trailed Nash on one of his self-supposed secret assignations. The implication is clear: it had all been taking place in Nash's head.

Interestingly, the viewer is left unsure about the reality of certain parts of the film. Whether this was intentional or not on the part of the makers, I don't know, but that hardly matters since the effect is there. For example, we are never sure whether the movie-Nash goes to MIT simply to teach and do pure, non-defense-related research, as the real Nash did. In which case, the initial discussions Nash has with his Princeton advisor about strategically important work is also part of his mental illusions. Or is that part supposed to be "real"? I found that this lingering feeling of never knowing exactly where the border between reality and hallucination lies is one of the most powerful effects of the film, and surely a strong indication of what life must be like all the time for the real John Nash.

The mathematical aspect of this movie is, of course, why an MAA Online columnist is writing about it. But the mathematics is incidental - although writer Goldsman does weave it in to the mental illness theme. It's about two people's struggle with the severe mental illness of one of them. Personally, I can think of no story that has greater emotional content. And arguably the best creative medium we have to convey an emotion story - an emotion-laden human journey - is the large-screen, Hollywood blockbuster movie. (The fact that 90% of movies coming out of Hollywood are pure crap is surely irrelevant. Around 90% of books are artistic junk too, though if people find them entertaining that surely gives them value.) With A Beautiful Mind, I believe Howard and Goldsman have used the medium to its best power to produce a masterpiece of a film of that genre.

But, of course, it's up to everyone to decide for themselves. This is a personal column, not a scientific journal, and my opinions are just my opinions. I should perhaps add that I had nothing to do with the making of the film, I do not know anyone who was involved (apart from a very brief email exchange with Dave Bayer who was the math consultant for the film) and have no stake in its success or otherwise. I do have a professional stake in the overall growth of the public understanding of and appreciation for mathematics, and for that reason have been interested in how the producers would deal with the Nash story, and how the general public will receive it.