A Beautiful Mind Review
by Mark R. Leeper (markrleeper AT yahoo DOT com)January 2nd, 2002
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Inspired by a true story, but taking very large liberties, this is the story of John Nash, a mathematical genius but a social misfit. His career goes down
unexpected paths when he agrees to help the OSS fight the Communist threat. Russell Crowe does surprisingly well in a taxing role and Jennifer Connelly equals his feat. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), +2 (-4 to +4)
The film is aptly titled A BEAUTIFUL MIND. John Nash's mind and the bargain it made with the world are exactly what this film is about. While it tells a fictionalized version of the life of a mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in economics, central to the story is John Nash's mind, what is happening in the world around it, and in what unique ways it perceives that world. Ron Howard very effectively showed the world what goes on in an Apollo spacecraft in APOLLO 13. Even that is a simple task compared to that of showing workings the mind of a human, both functioning and malfunctioning. And Nash's mind does both, as if it had made some sort of Faustian bargain with the world to see things enough differently to give him great insights, but in the process to be unable to see the world normally. That is frequently the price that genius pays. "Eccentric" is the term we apply to people either rich or brilliant like Isaac Newton and Nikola Tesla who would have been total social misfits but for the brilliance of their output.
The film begins with Nash's days at Princeton. Russell Crowe plays Nash, who was described by his former teachers as having a double helping of brains but only half a helping of heart, is frank beyond the point of rudeness and seems totally to lack social graces. He has won a prestigious scholarship, but he decides to use the faculty as a counsel to discuss his ideas rather than as teachers in the usual sense. Lectures are something he has completely dispensed with. His mind is a beehive of ideas, but he chastises himself that all are small ideas. None is worthy of a thesis. When he gets his idea, a cooperative "everybody-wins" strategy in game theory, it is the idea that will eventually win him a Nobel Prize. He also somewhat refines his social graces enough to earn the love of a woman, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), who would become his wife.
Nash knows that as one lecturer puts it, "mathematics won the war." It was public knowledge at this point that heavily dependent on mathematicians was the Manhattan Project as well as the project to break the Japanese codes. (In fact, the lecturer understates the case since then it was still considered top secret that British mathematicians had broken the German Enigma code and also unknown was just how important breaking that code had been to the British war effort.) It is at this point that that Nash begins to see the shady-looking government men hanging around Princeton. They seem to be taking an interest in Nash's work and wish to tempt him to apply his mind to a huge new problem of breaking Soviet codes and finding infiltrators. "McCarthy is an idiot but that doesn't make him wrong," the shifty OSS man William Parcher (played by Ed Harris) tells him. Nash makes the decision to let himself become embroiled in the cloak and dagger nether- world of counter-espionage. The pressure of balancing the two lives begins to show on his mental condition.
Akiva Goldsmith used the life of the real John Nash as a springboard in writing the screenplay, but fictionalized many details and introduced some anachronisms along the way. Alicia, in fact, divorced Nash early on. 1948 is a little early for pizza to be a favorite with college students. Some of the devices Nash sees at the OSS were not invented until years later. Other times the screenplay impishly plays tricks on the viewer.
Where the film attempts to visualize Nash's thought, it is not perfect but does a very interesting job. Nash sees complex mathematical structure is even the most prosaic things around him. That is not easy to convey on the screen. He looks for patterns in printed text, a difficult activity to show in a film, but the film manages to make it visual. Mathematics written on blackboards looks to have been written by someone who knew mathematics. The makeup effects used to show John and Alicia aging is not perfect, but is quite good. Connelly is known so well for juvenile roles it is almost hard to see her as the same woman here. As she ages in the film it becomes even harder. Crowe is good as a man who still has the body language of a child, but it is Connelly who rivets the viewer's focus when she is on the screen. Crowe, however, just does not physically resemble photographs of John Nash. An actor who to me does resemble the real Nash, Austin Pendleton, has a small and a different role in this film. For just a flash we see veteran actor Roy Thinnes of the TV series "The Invaders." Surprisingly, director Ron Howard did not place his brother Clint in the film anywhere. The name Howard does appear in the cast a few places, but not Clint Howard. That had become almost a Ron Howard trademark.
The task of showing an audience what is going on in a human mind is not easy in film. While Howard is not entirely successful doing it here, occasionally he uses cliches, but it is a valiant attempt. I rate this film a 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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Copyright 2001 Mark R. Leeper
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
