A Not-So-Beautiful Mind?

The Oscar race is marred by charges that a leading
film ignores anti-Semitism.

TOM TUGEND
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

A

s Sunday's Academy Awards presentation
draws near, this year's exceptionally fierce
competition has been enlivened — or
demeaned — by last-minute charges that
the brilliant, schizophrenic mathematician whose life
is portrayed in A Beautiful Mind is a "Jew-basher."
The incendiary accusation was recently made
public by Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge.
Drudge, best known for first publicizing the
Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, charged that the director
and screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind purposely
omitted mention of Nobel laureate John Forbes
Nash's alleged anti-Semitism, "cognizant that the
chances of winning Oscar gold would be lessened if
their film's protagonist was a basher of a religion
that is disproportionately represented in the
Academy voting pool."
Akiva Goldsman, the film's screenwriter, countered
in an impassioned phone interview that the charges
deliberately twist and exploit Nash's bizarre delusions
during his decades-long struggle with schizophrenia.
Drudge declined to identify the source that drew his
attention to the charges or comment on widespread
suspicions that a rival contender for Oscar honors put
him up to it, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The charges in question are based on quotes corn-
pressed in two pages of Sylvia Nasar's biography of
Nash, on which the film is loosely based.

Above: Oscar-nominated: Director
Ron Howarth right, and actor Russell
Crowe as the mature John Nash on
the set of Beautiful Mind."

Left: "Beautiful Mind" screenwriter
Akiva Goldsman: Holding a
paranoid schizophrenic responsible
for these ravings is "like blaming a
man with cancer for losing weight."

"Before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war," Nasar wrote,
"[Nash] explained he was a left-wing Palestinian
Arab refugee, a member of the PLO and a refugee"
making a dent in "Israel's border, petitioning Arab
nations to protect him from 'falling under the power
of the Israeli state.'"
At a later point, "The grandiose delusions in which

Nash was a powerful figure, the Prince of Peace, the
Left Foot of God and the Emperor of Antarctica,"
were replaced by fears of persecution, Nasar wrote.
Nash believed, according to the biography, that
"the root of all evil, as far as my personal life is con-
cerned, are Jews, in particular John Bricker," appar-
ently a colleague, "who is Hitler, a trinity of evil."
Nash concluded that he had to petition the Jews,
and also mathematicians and Arabs, "so that they
have the opportunity for redress of wrongs," which
must, however "not be- too openly revealed."
To screenwriter Goldsman, a man "very proud of
my Jewish heritage," holding a paranoid schizo-
phrenic responsible for these ravings is "like blaming
a man with cancer for losing weight."
It is characteristic of the disease, said Goldsman,
that suspicions of persecution fasten on those closest
to the patient, such as immediate family members.
"If his friends and colleagues are Jewish, then they
would naturally be seen as agents of a sinister force,
out to get him," said the writer.
Goldsman said he had talked at some length with
Nash, now 73 and whose schizophrenia appears to
be in remission, and had detected no indication of
anti-Semitism.
Has he questioned Nash about his earlier anti-Jewish
and anti- Israeli statements, Goldsman was asked.
"Nash has no remembrance of this or any other of
his delusions," Goldsman replied.
To the accusation that he and director Ron
Howard had deliberately scrubbed Nash's anti-
Semitic delusions, as well as his adultery and homo-
sexual episodes, Goldsman noted that the film was
never intended as a literal portrayal of Nash's life,
but rather aimed at capturing the essence of his per-
sonal struggle.
"We omitted Nash's childhood, his previous rela-
tionships with women, his dalliances with men and

BEAUTIFUL MIND on page 78

From Seinfeld' To Screenwriter

Jerry look alike Rob Festinger vies for Oscar for adapted
screenplay with "In the Bedroom."

-

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

S

creenwriter Rob Festinger, an ex-profession-
al Seinfeld look-alike, says his childhood
was "very effusive, very Jewish, very scream-
ing."
Which is why he's the last guy you'd expect to be
an Oscar contender for Todd Field's In the Bedroom,
the ultimate Yankee-angst flick of the year.
Based on the Andre Dubus short story "Killings,"
the film depicts a restrained Maine couple (Sissy
Spacek and Tom Wilkinson) battling hellish emo-
tions after the murder of their only child. The under-
stated drama is competing in five prime Oscar races,
including best picture and adapted screenplay (a
nomination Festinger shares with Field).
Festinger, 39, admits his personal angst has been

more reminiscent of Woody
Allen than Norman Rockwell.
What else can you say about a
former standup comic who
used to get , heckled because
he looks like Seinfeld?
But then again, it was the
alien quality of Dubus' char-
acters that mesmerized him
when he first read "Killings"
in 1992.
'A typical Jewish family
wouldn't respond to such dra-
Rob Festinger
matic events by not communi-
cating," says Festinger, who was guileless and self-
effacing during an interview before the nominees'
luncheon at a Beverly Hills, Calif, hotel last week.
"What riveted me was that the grief was so internal."

•

t•:=4..U. •

Rob Festinger:
`A typical Jewish
family wouldn't
respond to such
dramatic events by
not communicating"
says the co-screen-
writer of "In the
Bedroom," starring
Oscar-nominated
Sissy Spacek and
Tom Wilkinson,
pictured.

If the New England psyche is alien to Festinger,
the terrain is not. He spent most of his childhood in
the quaint Connecticut town of Bloomfield, where
he became bar mitzvah at an Orthodox synagogue
located on a dairy farm. His most vivid memory of
Hebrew school: Cows peering over the fence.
Eighth grade was less serene for Festinger, whose fam-
ily moved to a neighboring town in the early 1970s.

V\f,

aN

SCREENWRITER on page 78

3/22
2002

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