But he's right in tune with the movie that director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have conceived. It's not particularly dishonest that Goldsman's screenplay, allegedly based on Nasar's book, telescopes Nash's various stays in mental hospitals, most of them involuntary, into one incarceration. It might grow wearying (and dramatically inert) to watch a character being repeatedly committed. But the movie's contention that Nash chose to suffer bravely so he could continue his work rather than be incapacitated by medication and shock treatment converts his eventual emergence from schizophrenia (a mystery for which no one seems to have any certain explanation, and a very real, and hard-won triumph) into a movie cliché about the unconditional indomitability of the human spirit.

In 1996, Nash, who has found it difficult to work since his recovery, was introduced to an audience of psychiatrists in Madrid as "a symbol of hope." He told them, "To recover rationality after being irrational, to recover a normal life, is a great thing! But maybe it is not such a great thing. Suppose you have an artist. He's rational. But suppose he cannot paint. He can function normally. Is it really a cure? Is it really a salvation? ... I feel I am not a good example of a person who recovered unless I can do some good work, although I am rather old." Goldsman and Howard are like two members of the audience who heard the introduction and proceeded to ignore everything Nash had to say.

In this type of inspirational moviemaking, a conditional triumph is no triumph at all, and a complex or unlikable hero is unthinkable. Goldsman and Howard have expurgated everything about Nash's bisexuality and the fact that he fathered a child out of wedlock. His wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) stays faithfully by his side in the movie. We aren't told that, though Alicia did shelter him and though they are still together, she divorced him in 1963.

We aren't told that their son, also a gifted mathematician and also schizophrenic, has suffered as his father did, living a life often divided between rootless wandering and institutionalization. And there is nothing of Nash's plain unpleasantness: his racism, his snobbery, his history of violent behavior toward others. Of course, none of these things lessens Nash's accomplishment, diminishes the originality of his ideas or makes his emergence from mental illness any less remarkable. But, by omitting them, the moviemakers are signaling that think they do. And they're implicitly saying to the audience that we can't be addressed as grown-ups.

That seems to be why Goldsman has come up with a spectacularly dumb device to tell the story of Nash's descent into madness. (If you're not familiar with Nash's story, you may want to stop reading here.) One of the first manifestations of Nash's schizophrenia was his belief that aliens were sending him secret coded messages through the New York Times and over radio stations. (He also, at other times, attempted to renounce his U.S. citizenship, and traveled to Europe believing he was a secret religious figure chosen to be the Prince of Peace.)

In the movie, Nash is contacted by a shadowy government agent (Ed Harris, dressed up like Dick Tracy) who tells him the Soviets have planted sleeper agents throughout America and that the agents are receiving coded messages in various periodicals instructing them on destroying the U.S. in a nuclear holocaust. It's the setup for a "Sixth Sense"-style switcheroo; Harris and the messages Nash circles obsessively in newspapers and magazines are all part of his hallucination. (Ron Howard must have amazing powers of persuasion. I'd love to have been in on the negotiations where he convinced an actor of Ed Harris' stature to play a hallucination.)

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