Black Hawks and Beauties
Reviewing A Beautiful Mind and Black Hawk Down.

Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
January 5-6, 2002

Beautiful Mind is annoying film critics and gay activists because director Ron Howard's portrait of mathematician John Nash takes major liberties with Nash's actual life story. Gone are Nash's illegitimate son and mistress, his mid-1950s arrest for gay cruising, and his divorce from his wife Alicia. In their place is a deceptively straightforward story about a genius who makes a great leap forward in his youth, is trapped in the grip of paranoid schizophrenia from his mid-20s until his 60s, and makes a miraculous recovery just in time to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994.

The exhaustive warts-and-all Nash was the subject of Sylvia Nasar's biography of the same name, and the movie's divergence from it is the source of these condemnations. "Elegant but wrong," said A. O. Scott in the New York Times. Peter Rainer in New York magazine condemned the "faint whiff of condescension" whose purpose was to "bring this brain down to bite-size." Andrew Sullivan and others expressed anger and upset at the absence of Nash's same-sex sex life from A Beautiful Mind.

Guess what? They're all wrong. First of all, Sullivan does Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsmann an injustice, because their forbearance in the matter of Nash's gay conduct is due at least in part to their desire not to conflate homosexuality and schizophrenia in the viewer's mind. And the critics' notion that A Beautiful Mind reduces genius to bite size, or gets the life of the mind wrong suggests to me that they went into the movie with a preconceived bias about its director.

Ron Howard has made some terrific movies (and some bad ones) but none of them has been all that serious — and his pedigree as the child actor who played first the innocent Opie and then the somewhat imbecilic Richie Cunningham continues to dog him decades later.

What Howard's own intellectual gifts are I cannot say, but in A Beautiful Mind he manages to capture as no filmmaker I can remember ever has the way a brilliant intelligence works. A Beautiful Mind is a storytelling feat of great brilliance, but it's told with such quiet confidence that it seems unassuming. Only a drippy ending, during which Nash delivers a Nobel address that sounds like a bad Oscar speech, mars what is unequivocally the best live-action American movie of 2001. (The best American movie overall is Monsters, Inc.)

The movie isn't a biography of Nash and doesn't pretend to be. It's a series of variations based on Nash's life that attempt to capture what life is really like for someone suffering from schizophrenia. To examine the methods Howard and Goldsmann use to boil the Nash story down to its essence would do injury to your experience of the film, so I will forbear from doing so.

But Rainer's notion that the film reduces Nash to "bite size" is very nearly as demented as Nash himself. In Russell Crowe's amazing rendering, Nash is as singular a character as the movies can imagine. He is utterly governed by his mind — both because it works so quickly and because it is diseased. Capturing that quality on film is a rare thing indeed, and if Howard and Goldsmann had to jettison a men's-room scene or two to capture it, so be it.

Black Hawk Down is, by contrast, a movie that has no idea what to say about what it's showing us. This graphic, powerful and meaningless exercise in filmmaking tries to recreate the messy 18-hour Somalia operation in 1993 in which 19 U.S. servicemen were killed. It's structured very much like Mark Bowden's book of the same name, which begins as the operation commences and ends as it concludes. But Bowden gives us context, detail, strategy, geopolitical explanations, and vivid characterizations of those who ran the operation, those who performed heroically, and those who died.

Director Ridley Scott gives us guns and dirt and blood. We cannot tell one character from another. We cannot understand where anybody is or where anybody is trying to go. Most important, we cannot understand why Americans are in Somalia or why it's important to be watching the movie. Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer salute the bravery of the soldiers, which is funny, because they're both cowards. They can't bear to face the fact that the proximate cause for the disasters that befell the Americans that day in Somalia — and the horrifying consequences to America and the West in the quick pullout that followed — are due entirely to Hollywood's hero, Bill Clinton.

Oh, they know it. But they won't say it. And that tentativeness is one of the causes for the failure of Black Hawk Down to do much besides make you feel ill.

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