A beautiful mind game. (notes from a blond).

What if someone made a movie about JFK, his storied family background, his adored children, his naval career, his congressional career, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, his 22 months in the presidency, his tragic and untimely death--but left out every woman in his life but Jackie? No Marilyn Monroe, no Judith Campbell Exner, no every starlet at Metro that Peter Lawford could cajole into coming out to the beach house. You'd have a very stirring film about the perfect American hero, and it would get attacked like crazy in the media. A very important facet of a very important man's life was being assigned to the cutting room floor.

Do you think the people who made the movie would defend themselves by saying, "The women weren't significant; besides, it impeded the dramatic flow and we really weren't interested in that aspect of his life. Besides, it makes him look bad"? You'd think nobody involved with the film knows how to make a movie about a complicated man without his complications making him look bad.

This is exactly the scenario that is being played out by the makers of A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe's current tour de force, in which he sheds his loincloth (if only) for the academic gown of the Princeton mathematician John Nash. Nash is a certifiable genius and a certifiable paranoid schizophrenic who we watch go through shock treatments and delusions galore. Aided by the Love of a Good Woman, he eventually comes to some sort of uneasy truce with his demons. It's elegantly and sensitively made, but the movie is a one-trick pony, and once that trick is revealed (which I won't do here) there isn't a lot else of interest going on. That is because, in their effort to make an acceptable mainstream drama out of Nash's life, the filmmakers have stripped away one or two of the trickier aspects of this tormented genius's saga.

By now you know or have guessed that the part they dumped was the gay part. Nash was known to be bisexual, was known to have gay relations with other men in his class and social circle, and was even arrested on a morals charge in a Santa Monica, Calif., rest room.

All this has been pared away from his life in the name of efficient drama. How come? You think Russell Crowe wouldn't play it? The first film I saw him in was the gay drama The Sum of Us, made in Australia, in which he played a gay part. He doesn't strike me as being afraid of much of anything professionally.

So you think the public wouldn't buy it as a facet of Nash's character? You think it would be the straw that breaks the audience's back? Aren't audiences who want to see this picture likely to be grown-up enough to understand? I mean, this isn't Dude, Where's My Slide Rule?

I asked a straight friend who falls with a heavy thud into the target demographic. "I'm sympathetic with their plight," he said of the filmmakers. "How do you make a movie about a paranoid schizophrenic who's gay and not have that seem to be a part of his disease? How do you delineate it for the average audience? You don't want them to walk out feeling that homosexuality was one of his afflictions. So you eliminate that part."

I get it. So if it's true, there's not a dainty political correctness at work, there's just a failure of craft, hiding behind a geisha fan of PC. "Since we don't know how to deal with it, we'll just make it disappear because it would make our guy look bad, and you gay folks wouldn't want another homosexual villain, would you?"

So we once again have straight people endorsing invisibility because it's good for us. In a world where Hitler and Bin Laden are rumored to be gay and the guy who shot Versace is billed as a gay serial killer, we're being spared one more explanation. Gee, thanks. I don't know if we could have handled the burden of pointing out that we, like every other group of humans, come in every shape, size, and mental state. And occasionally win a Nobel Prize.

We are just like You, albeit with fabulous fashion sense--present company excepted. Get back to me when you've finished paving that road to hell.