I watched the Academy Awards a few months back with a grim fascination. Though I didn't want to watch it and was embarrassed to do so, I felt compelled. So, my curiosity was satisfied, but in the meantime I was disappointed to see \A Beautiful Mind"" win for best film. I had seen it already and was disgusted at the overblown, romanticized, blubbering heartwarmingness of it all.
This is what I saw from my perspective:
Irritatingly self-centered professor begins dating and then marries his student. Later, self-centered professor becomes incapable of taking care of himself, so the once ambitious and promising woman'a woman who earned a degree in physics from MIT in the '50s'becomes saddled with his care, as well as the care of his child. Promising woman spends entire life taking care of a man who, for all intents and purposes, is not the man she married. Man receives Nobel Prize. Woman receives a nod to her lifetime of service. He is celebrated for his genius. She is celebrated for her willingness to give up everything she had, everything she could have had, indeed everything... for a man.
Other than a single scene in which Alicia's frustration is made clear (when she smashes the mirror) and a second where she expresses her doubts and then quickly takes them back, the devastation that was made of her life was missing. An untrained eye can see that there was something awry despite the movie's whitewashed portrayal. However, a quick few minutes of Internet digging brings up a whole host of things that got ""accidentally"" left out.
John Nash wasn't a nice guy just waiting for a nice girl. He'd knocked up one girl before and, despite her desire to marry him, he left her and her little boy to fend for themselves (so much for self-sacrifice.) Somehow his repeated homosexual liaisons managed to get lost in the film, as did his affairs and his arrest for solicitation. Eventually all this did, apparently, get to Alicia (not the unreasonably perfect angel she was portrayed to be.) They divorced, at which point Nash moved in with his mother (any female caregiver will do). But later, Alicia took him back in (though they never remarried).
By far the most offensive part of the movie for me was at Nash's Nobel Prize speech when he thanks Alicia. Her lost life is vindicated when he gives her a nod on the Nobel Prize stage. This doesn't make her life less invisible or less thankless but it does obscure her sacrifice and how thoroughly invisible and thankless it was. Jennifer Connelly, the actress who played Alicia, was quoted as saying that she ""was playing ... a slightly fictionalized version of her."" No crap. I wouldn't have been nearly as angry if I hadn't seen a thousand other movies in which the woman takes care of [insert dependent family member(s) here] at the expense of her own fulfillment.
Of course, if a man wants a family and a career and a life with recreation he's well rounded. If a woman wants it, she's selfish and asking for too much. In the end, that's what really makes me steam. These women who sacrifice their lives are praised for it as if they were the Virgin Mary herself.
The message is clear: The ideal woman, the best possible woman, the woman we should all strive to be... is an invisible woman.
