dardanelles
As an addendum to the last post, I’d like to mention that I’ve reconsidered my ringing endorsement of the film. The reason? It’s blatantly revisionist history. From the mouth of the screenwriter himself:
“I was reasonably absurd in my approach. I don’t know how to write a bio-pic and this was one of the best researched scholarly biographies I’d ever read. Instead I wanted to use my understanding of what I’d read with additional research to evoke the grander beats of John’s life. I didn’t want it to be literal. I wanted to take [a] stab at the truth of John’s life, but not by way of the facts.
Does anyone see the problem here? To paraphrase: “I want to portray the truth, but not the real truth.” Not that John Nash wasn’t an inspiring man, but to repackage and fictionalize key moments in the man’s life, in either a positive or negative way, is outright lying. What version of history can we trust when such things become commonplace? The least they could have done was to change the characters’ names. Then it would have been a solid, technically-superior inspirational film. As it is, though, those who don’t take the time to research the real man behind the movie (and I would estimate this accounts for a large percentage of the viewing public) are in danger of being misled. This isn’t as trivial an issue as it might seem–history is not relative. Granted, we all have our respective scopes of experience, but the interpretation of history is subject to the same absolutes as the rest of life. There is real right and real wrong and real truth, and whatever vantage point such an influential medium as film chooses to take on its subject matter, it has an ethical responsibility to get the facts right. I am disappointed.