Final Tribeca weekend salutes Belafonte and 'A Beautiful Mind'

By Kevin Lally

Watching Sing Your Song, the documentary about pioneering entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte that screened at the Tribeca Film Festival Friday night, you can't help flashing on thosescenes in Zeligand Forrest Gump in which the lead character always seems to be present at a key moment in history. In Susanne Rostock's film, Belafonte can be seen in intimate, often consequential meetings with Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and Nelson Mandela, not to mention friends and fellow artists like Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier and Quincy Jones. As this movie makes clear, Belafonte was not only a performer who broke racial barriers in the 1950s and beyond, he was also an impassioned agent of social change who had a direct influence within political circles during the Civil Rights era.

The 84-year-old singer, actor and activist, walking with a cane but still vibrant, appeared to a standing ovation at the festival, and engaged in a thoughtful conversation with PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley. The film, co-produced by Belafonte's daughter Gina, follows the entirety of Belafonte's career, from his youthful breakthrough as a handsome and charismatic singer, to his actingroles in films like Carmen Jones and Odds Against Tomorrow, to his award-winning musical TV specials, up to his current role as a champion of impoverished inner-city youth. Reminiscences of the tense 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi and the uproar over white singer Petula Clark clutching his arm during a 1968 NBC TV special show how far this nation has come, but, calling incarceration "the new slavery," Belafonte voices profound regret that his decades of activism have not made the prospects any brighterfor much of the nation's black youth.

In his talk with Smiley, Belafonte said he remains angry about the current political and economic climate, but called bitterness a waste of time. Smiley coaxed him to recall a conversation with Martin Luther King in which King warned of the challenges facing civil-rights activists in the 1960s: "We're integrating into a burning house," he mused. "And we have no choice but to become firemen." For Belafonte, the choices were always clear. Despite his immense success as an entertainer, "my life would have served no purpose if I had not committed to the struggle against poverty and injustice."

Another weekend highlight at Tribeca was the Saturday afternoon 10th-anniversary screening of A Beautiful Mind, continuing the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's annual Tribeca program focusing on movies with scientific themes. The 2001 Best Picture Oscar winner holds up very well, with its ingenious script by Akiva Goldsman making both mathematical theories and the nightmare of schizophrenia accessible to a mass audience, and its moving performances by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly as tormented math prodigy John Forbes Nash and his devoted wife Alicia.

Director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer andwriter Goldsman were all on hand for a post-screening Q&A. along with Sylvia Nasar, the author of the book that inspired the film; the movie's math consultant Davd Bayer; Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene, and NPR "Science Friday" host Ira Flatow, who served as moderator. Howard told the audience he hadn't seen the film again since it opened, and happily attested, "I was moved by it... I like it." Whether they admit it or not, mental illness touches every family, he contended, so "a film like this can become very immediate."

Author Nasar reported that John Nash is alive and active at the age of 82 and still at Princeton, and noted how inspiring it's been to "watch him get his life back."

Goldsman, who won an Oscar for his script, said he begged for the opportunity to work on the adaptation; at the time, he ruefully recalled, he was "in movie jail" after the failure of Batman & Robin, which he wrote. For Goldsman, the project was very personal: His parents, a therapist and a child psychologist, ran a group home for emotionally disturbed children, so he had direct experience with schizophrenics like Nash.

The one downbeat note amidst all the praise for A Beautiful Mind was Grazer's assertion that a film with these themes would be "impossible" to make in today's Hollywood, unless it was done for under $4 million. If one of the most successful producers around feels that way, what does that say about the market for serious and challenging projects in 2011?