Trivia question: how many winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture were based on a biographical book about a single subject covering the life of its subject from childhood through adulthood? In other words, Best Picture winners based on a single book that told the life story rather that focusing on just a section of that life or covering the entire story of more than one subject? If you guess Ron Howard’s adaptation of A Beautiful Mind, you’re wrong. But not by much. The only other movie that genuinely qualifies is The Last Emperor. While a solid handful of Best Picture winners have been based on biographical (or autobiographical) books, they have been limited in scope: The Life of Emile Zola, Patton, Lawrence of Arabia, among them. The point being that while non-fiction texts can be made into great movies, one of the hardest jobs in Hollywood is transforming an entire life story into a compelling movie. And, of course, in that sense, A Beautiful Mind does not qualify since the film ignores John Nash’s entire childhood for the most part. And that is the point of this analysis.
It is such a common phrase as to have become trite if not entirely meaningless: “the book was better.” By which is meant that the book a movie was based on is usually preferred to the movie by those have read the book. While that may be true in the majority of cases, it is not quite as hard and fast a rule as it may seem. To name just a few of the most obvious cases where the movie surpasses the artistry of the book: Jaws, The Godfather, The Shining and—inevitably, of course—A Beautiful Mind. The movie about John Nash—only partly due to Russell Crowe’s truly majestic performance—significantly improves upon its source material to the point where it almost inconceivable that anyone could argue otherwise.
Which is not to say that Sylvia Nasar’s biography is bad. It did, after all, win the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Generally speaking, they don’t hand out honors like that to bad books. What makes Nasar’s biography a lesser entity than the film adapted from it is complicated because an argument can be made that those very things are the biggest problems of the movie. The film invents the idea that the schizophrenic illusions which haunt Nash’s mind exist as three-dimensional visual representations. In other words: John Nash never saw the hallucinations which interact with him in the film as though they are actual flesh and blood characters. No doubt that this makes the film problematic because it is not just a lie, but a lie that entirely subverts the reality of schizophrenia. On the other hand, it makes perfect dramatic sense and allows for the narrative to flow more freely and quickly. Nasar, on the other hand, presents a narrative that is bound by the chains of reality and the reality of Nash’s schizophrenic visions, hallucinations and illusions is simply not as dramatically engaging as the fiction. More tragic, certainly, but not as viscerally entertaining.
A bigger problem with Nasar’s text-based portrait of Nash’s mind at work is that mind didn’t see mathematical problems as text, but as visual representations of problems to be solved. The beautiful mind at work is much more satisfying presented visually on a screen than with numbers and letters on a page. Ron Howard could take advantage of the magic of cinema to literally show the viewer what Nash himself saw. Nasar does not have that advantage, but is faced with the same problem: how does one make economic theory come to vivid life? Perhaps it simply cannot be done, but one thing is inescapable: it is not done by Nasar with the felicity with which it is done on film.
Is the book worth reading for fans of the film? Absolutely, if for no other reason than that—like with any book—there are going to be things of interest which never made it into the screenplay. What is more likely, however, is that enjoyment of the life of John Nash in literary form is going to be greater for those who had not yet seen the film adaptation. But simply having seen the film first should not deter any potential reader of a biography well worth reading about a man well worth learning about.
