Z/Web

I was reading the book and hadn’t finished it before seeing the film. Big mistake: see the film first. The film is very different: it works, but it’s so different it will irritate you if you’ve read the book. Overall the film’s okay. It’s well-directed and the performances are good, but it’s too simple. The character of math genius John Nash is a complicated one, and his trials with insanity and back to rationality are profound. Unfortunately, the movie gives us only a glimpse of that, and it’s a Hollywoodized version of it, all wrapped up and nicely packaged. Real life is much more complicated and ambiguous. What I felt was the most significant part of the book, John Nash’s realization that he was losing touch with rationality, is scarcely touched in the film. Think about it: for a genius to lose his abililty to reason, that’s like an Olympic athlete losing his legs. It’s a huge shock but the film doesn’t deal with that at all. Still, the film isn’t bad, just simple. I joked that it should have been called A Simple Mind, and maybe that’s correct. The film also had a major flaw of not showing us Nash’s genius early on: he had many accomplishments and is widely considered one of the top minds of the last century, but the film glosses over that, assuming that if they tell us he’s a genius, that’s enough. I would have done much of this very differently.