SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE

by Nathaniel Rogers
of the
FiLM EXPERiENCE

Oscar season approaches. With it comes the annual flood of biopics. I have recently seen two of them. Do they capture the real live person onscreen? How truthful are they to their subjects? Have the lives been distilled well into two hours? Reduction is necessary for any film contemplating a life - but has the subject's life been reduced in meaningful or meaningless ways? Both A Beautiful Mind and Iris attempt to tell true life stories. Their subjects are two hard-to-pin-down academic notables who first gained notoriety in their college years.

A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, a mathematician who won the Nobel prize in his golden years for a revolution in game theory that he developed in his youth. Ron Howard gave himself a daunting task when he decided to direct this film. Though Nash's story does have a triumphant conclusion, one suitable to the temperament of this feel-good director, his life was one of darkness. He was a troubled man, lost in his own mind and mathematical theories. He was bisexual, but married to a long-suffering woman. And most famously, he was an institutionalized shizophrenic several years before he won the Nobel prize.

Howard kicks off the film while Nash is still young and promising, and perhaps while the director could still relate to his story. Unfortunately, this is before things get interesting, and it's here where there is much exposition and obvious foreshadowing of the events which will conclude the picture two hours and some minutes later. Nash was brilliant in his youth, but socially inept. He was gifted at the abstractions of math, but seemingly couldn't get his head around more concrete matter like dating or attending classes. Although Russell Crowe is never believable as a college student when the film begins, he is technically a strong actor, and creates a consistent persona in these scenes that last throughout the picture. His star power and charisma go a long way in making a man with few friends and questionable social behavior into a likeable and interesting protagonist. His Nash is all bumbling and awkward, but obviously gifted and driven. Crowe has an intense focus that works exceedingly well in the portrayal of this man. As you watch Nash work out mathematical theory or break codes, you believe that he is living inside his own head. You feel that he's lost in the mysteries of the mind and that you are shut out from what's happening behind his eyes.

The film really kicks into gear when Nash lands himself a plum job in academia, finds himself breaking Communist codes for the government, meeting Alica, the girl of his dreams (a fetching but unchallenged Jennifer Connelly) and marrying her. The film takes a crucial and unexpected turn about halfway into the film which will no doubt alienate some audiences but that I found compelling. Unfortunately it's the last thing that interested me. At about the time that the film begins to focus on and temporarily face up to Nash's illness, it loses all focus and begins to head for the land of excessive sentimentality. Howard's sudden turn in mood here reminded me of an all too familiar feeling during the summer when Spielberg's botched A.I. opened. Take one filmmaker, obviously gifted with feel-good material. Present him with dark material to stretch him. See the results: he can't commit to the darkness. He doesn't have the stomach for it.

After Nash's gut-wrenching diagnosis, and meeting with his wife (the strongest scene in the film), the picture descends into easy platitudes about love overcoming all, and becomes a repetitive, simpleminded, and occassionally annoying film that still has one hour left to go. Whenever a film loses you halfway through, it gives you a lot of time to focus on the other things that went wrong in its making. Why, for example, does the movie not only shy away from Nash's bisexuality, but go out of its way to point in the other direction with key scenes emphasizing Nash's sexual interest in women? Why is Alicia Nash reduced to a caricature fantasy woman?

I respect Jennifer Connelly as an actress. She was sensational in last year's Requiem for a Dream, but in this motion picture she has zero to work with. The real Alicia Nash is no doubt an interesting woman, but as presented here she's a perfect 1950s clone. She's smart enough to be at MIT, yet perfectly content to paint watercolors, fix her husband's ties, and act as a trophy at parties. Her other character traits: Hmmm, well she wears tight clothes, never gains a pound even during pregnancy or after giving birth, initiates lovemaking. And is unendingly faithful to her husband despite his illness and impotency. Loyalty is an admirable character trait, but it is the only dimension that this woman had. Her portrayal is retro 50s longing at best and dangerous gender propaganda at worst.

But the greatest sin of all that the movie commits is its portrayal of schizophrenia. Though the film starts out on the right foot, treating the disease as something alarming and frightening, by the end of the picture the filmmakers are busy trying to convince you that all you need is love and willpower to overcome this mental illness, that's it's all in your head. Well, technically, being a mental illness, it is. But you don't recover from mental illness by ignoring your meds and trusting in willpower. That's an offensive message. The ending is bogus, and so is the movie.

English director Richard Eyre also took on a difficult task when he decided to write and direct the life story of Iris Murdoch. Unlike Nash's story, Iris does not have a happy conclusion. There was no way around her death or sad Alzheimer's-fueled decline. Thankfully, Eyre has the right temperament as a director to portray a life beset by mental darkness. Murdoch was a freethinking young woman, socially charismatic (people reportedly swarmed around her), who lived a life of the mind, filled with literary and philosophical theory. She was bisexual and promiscuous, but by all accounts lived an emotionally committed life to her partner, literary critic John Bayley. Most famously she was a prolific novelist and academic celebrity before her mind was destroyed by Alzheimer's.

Eyre doesn't so much begin the film as merely throw you in the water with the young title woman in her youth. She is seen swimming underwater, an image that will reoccur throughout the picture with both the old and the young versions of the character. The young Iris is played with a seductive bohemian vitality by Kate Winslet. We've come to expect perfection from her, and she ably captures the electricity of this dynamic woman. She has also apparently studied Judi Dench. The two actresses seem to actually be the same woman at different ages. A consistent persona - the head tilt, the ungraceful gait - is seen in both. (It doesn't hurt that both of them have enormous screen presence.) Dench and Winslet are adept at projecting intelligence, and you feel the full force of Murdoch's mind at all times, as well as her ability to woo anyone.

In atypical fashion, the story is told simultaneously in youth and old age. The picture begins to find its narrative momentum when Iris falls in love with shy fellow student Bayley (Hugh Bonneville) in the youthful narrative, and when Bayley (now played by Jim Broadbent) discovers she has Alzheimer's in the old age portion. Like Dench and Winslet, the two actors seem to share the same soul.

Sadly, although the film is quite beautiful at times, it takes a downturn after Murdoch is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The story remains compelling, but the filmmaker can't seem to find a way toward narrative flow, shuttling as he does back and forth in time. The picture does gain some insight into personality and longterm relationships by doing so, but at continual narrative cost. After the harrowing diagnosis, it descends into a repetitive, ruthless structure of suffering. Watching Dench disappear behind vacant eyes is wrenching, especially when we keep flitting back to the ever glowing Winslet. The movie has already settled into this frutstrating cycle with an hour left to go, and as it wears on, one becomes frustrated with it.

Why, if the film is meant to be a portrait of Alzheimer's, should the filmmaker choose a victim as accomplished as Murdoch, who deserves a story about her life rather than a story about her disease? And though the picture doesn't exactly shie away from Iris's promiscuities, why is the confrontation over her infidelity between John and the young Iris so fraught with drama when their real lives continued on that way and he was reportedly content with the arrangement? And why is John Bayley, a notable accomplished literary critic, also reduced to a one dimensional doting husband who can see nothing but his wife? Where is his life? Was it too much to ask the filmmaker to show us a little of why Iris loved him back? Theirs was a life of the mind and yet the only one who seems to think in the film is Iris.

In the end Iris is a stronger film than A Beautiful Mind, but not by much. Iris's higher degree of success can be chalked up to its level of integrity and truthfulness regarding both subject and disease. Its gender politics are also a lot less suspect than those found in the John Nash story. Eyre's film softens Iris's libertine ways, but at least it acknowledges them, even if it discreetly looks away. The creators of A Beautiful Mind have not only looked the other way - they'd rather gouge out their eyes than see anything that didn't fit in with their Hollywood-style portrait. That film is entirely undone by Ron Howard's fear of the dark sides of human nature, and he reduces the brilliant, troubled mind of John Nash to a bag of ticks. His mathematical accomplishments remain an abstraction throughout, but at least they are touched upon. This is one area where it excells over Iris. Murdoch is more fully captured as a persona, but the film neglects her philosophical and literary accomplishments.

Despite all these frustrations, both films remain touching in one small way - they may not be entirely honest at bottom, yet they do paint satisfying pictures of loyal and supportive marriages of minds. The message that sends is a lovely one, but nevertheless Iris and A Beautiful Mind remain out-of-focus snapshots of formidable and complex souls.

©2002 Nathaniel Rogers
CineScene