So we see it and we're all moved and stuff, and we're talking about it on the drive home and the next day. It is a great movie, despite an almost balmy need to somehow generate a happy ending. Mid-way through, there's all these important draining shots of the emaciated Jennifer Connelly as Russell Crowe's long -suffering wife... so you know the ultimate payoff is going to be some big happy sunshine scene.

On the way home, I'm even considering getting the biography. Amused as I am by anti-social mathematical geniuses who imagine anti-Communist warhawks recruiting from the shadows, I suppose. Plus, I found it pretty damn creepy to know that a real person lived throught this, is still alive, and is probably still a little off.

Thing is, it's all bunk. Now, you have to expect a movie - a Ron Friggin Howard movie - would take some liberties with the man's life, but after some quick perusals of internet bios of John Forbes Nash Jr., it's obvious that somebody wrote a screenplay about a tortured neo-Rain Man and then sloppily attached a still-living Nobel Prize math legend to it.

Now I feel kind of cheated, because you're led to believe that this Inspiring Story, however fictionalized, actually happened. And I watched it with that in mind; my wife and I discussed it with that in mind. You wouldn't think it was fictionalized *that* much, right? Well, his Princeton doctorate came from a thesis entitled "Non-cooperative games"... which is a math topic I could certainly get into but must have seemed too geeky for film audiences. He was actually married twice and has a child to both wives. Alicia (the "movie wife") was his second and she eventually left him, although she did continue to try to help him. I found no mention of Wheeler Labs. And according to one quote I found, his mania took the form of disagreeable voices in his head, not the form of Lovable British Schoolboy Rogue, Mute Adorable Ragamuffin, and Mysterious Threatening OSS Freedom Fighter.

I have to say, though, that I was totally snookered by the movie. 40 minutes in, I was thinking "THIS is the movie that's going to beat Fellowship? A sappy McCarthy-era piece about a social retard who becomes a spy?" I was happily surprised by the patented descent into madness bits. And by the time Russell Crowe's age makeup was applied and a young frosh eagerly approaches The Legend John Nash, I was quietly hoping to myself "Please let this kid be real."

One thing I did find. John Forbes Nash Jr's official website, hosted by the Princeton Dept of Mathematics. My guess is, he doesn't want you to contact
him.