It all comes to an end this weekend: the furtive lobbying, the flinging of accusations, the petty rivalry. By now we know that Hollywood studios are not above a little politicking for the coveted Best Picture award. But whether or not the hype about a studio-driven smear campaign has any merit, there's something disconcerting in the way the debate over Best Picture contender "A Beautiful Mind," and its subject, the brilliant but schizophrenic mathematician John Nash has been framed in the media.
Murmurs about the film started back in November, after a DrudgeReport story charged director Ron Howard with distorting Nash's biography -- leaving out his apparent bisexuality -- to make him more palatable to moviegoers.
The story made the rounds of the gay press, then the mainstream press. It drew outrage in both quarters. Matt Drudge quoted a GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) exec as saying it was "rather alarming in this day and age that Universal Studios and Dreamworks would find same-sex love too offensive to be depicted in a major motion picture." Andrew Sullivan called it a "classic piece of anti-gay editing." In Slate, Chris Suellentrop called the excised infatuations "important events," and accused the filmmakers of "lies of omission."
Certainly there is compelling evidence of bisexuality, or at least bisexual experimentation, on Nash's part. Sylvia Nasar, his biographer, cites several instances in which Nash came on to other men, including one which ended in an arrest for indecent exposure in a public bathroom. In at least one case, an affectionate friendship with a fellow mathematician turned into "something very close to love" for Nash. In another, Nasar describes Nash and another man as "friends -- and then more than friends." None of these relationships made it into the film.
But in one of several interviews Nasar has given since the story broke, she defended the movie, explaining that "Nash had several emotionally intense relationships with other men in his early twenties," and that "Nobody who knew him thought he was gay."More importantly, Nash himself denied being "gay" on last week's 60 Minutes. Whatever the extent of his homosexual history, he doesn't seem to consider it an important omission.
So who does decide when a film -- especially a biopic -- is sufficiently "authentic"? Ron Howard has steadfastly denied being anti-gay, and to be fair, the film glosses over many other aspects of Nash's complex persona as well. Some of these -- like his alleged anti-Semitism -- have been dismissed as by-products of his mental illness. Other elements, like Nash's relationship with his devoted wife, Alicia, are given center stage.
Howard admits the film takes liberties with Nasar's book; his movie claims only to be "inspired by events in the life of John Nash," rather than a strict, play-by-play account. But that's his prerogative as an artist. He didn't set out to film a documentary. As Nasar put it in a recent interview: "Obviously, the movie compresses, telescopes, fictionalizes. Howard took the most compelling aspects of Nash's life -- genius, madness, recovery, recognition plus the role of Alicia and the math colleagues -- and, like the good storyteller he is, used those elements to explore the mystery of the human mind."
Of course it's not quite that simple. Homosexuality has a long and ugly history of cinematic censorship. Intentionally or not, by omitting it from his narrative Howard bypassed his opportunity to correct this imbalance. But it isn't fair to saddle him with this political burden, especially since his subject, John Nash, has dismissed the experiences as a footnote in his own life.
There are legitimate, inexcusable cases of media censorship that deserve our close attention. For months after the September 11 attacks, the major TV networks kept Flight 93 hero Mark Bingham in the closet -- despite protest from his mother that being gay was central to his identity. As a result, until recently television audiences were denied a crucial piece of American history -- the very real contribution gays and lesbians make to our country.
But the story of John Nash does not merit that kind of scrutiny; his sexual history remains as peripheral to his screen life as it does to his real one. We have to ask ourselves what kind of precedent we are setting for poetic license in attacking this film. It merely does what every larger-than-life portrait always does -- mine the truth for a good narrative.
