A Beautiful Mind

At Princeton University, John Nash struggles to make a worthwhile contribution to serve as his legacy to the world of mathematics. He finally makes a revolutionary breakthrough that will eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. After graduate school he turns to teaching, becoming romantically involved with his student Alicia. Meanwhile the government asks his help with breaking Soviet codes, which soon gets him involved in a terrifying conspiracy plot. Nash grows more and more paranoid until a discovery that turns his entire world upside down. Now it is only with Alicia's help that he will be able to recover his mental strength and regain his status as the great mathematician we know him as today.
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Critic by Yazmin Ghonaim
A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard (How the Grinch Stole Christmas; Apollo 13) and written for the screen by Akiva Goldsman (who also wrote: Batman and Robin, Practical Magic), is based on the award-winning book of the same name by New York Times economics correspondent Silvia Nasar. A Beautiful Mind explores the complex mind of John Forbes Nash (1928 - ), a genius who battled with schizophrenia and who, in 1994, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions on game theory.*
A Beautiful Mind Movie Review

Upon entering the school of Economics in Princeton in September of 1947, John Nash (Russell Crowe: Gladiator) quickly separates himself from others by appearing detached and self-absorbed. During a welcoming reception, a camera follows Nash closely and aims at representing the character's point of view: he plays with a fine crystal glass and observes the beautiful --and almost imperceptible-- patterns produced by the bent rays of reflected sunlight. As Nash is engulfed by his observations, the camera seems to establish the character's obsession with patterns, and the quiet, lonely pleasure he derives from manipulating them. Surprisingly, in a subsequent scene, Nash observes another character and remarks: "There must be a mathematical explanation for how bad your tie is." Rather than merely summoning the other's (and the viewer's) sense of humor, this initial portrayal introduces the sub theme of Nash's social ineptitude. While some scenes focus on the protagonist's rebellious, self-confident nature --with such quotes to his Princeton classmates as "Classes destroy your potential for creativity!"-- other scenes effectively explore his insecurities. For example, annoyed by Nash's arrogance, Hansen (Josh Lucas: The Deep End) challenges his confidence by asking: "What if you never come up with your original idea? What if you lose?" While Nash's desperate response --"I can't fail! This is all I am!"-- introduces a narrative shift, where the plot begins to focus on the protagonist's weakness --that is, his fear of never attaining intellectual success-- A Beautiful Mind begins to focus on the usefulness of the character's genius. Quickly, Nash proves to his loyal colleagues the simple uses of his mathematical theories, by playfully modeling one after a game of courting women. Aided in part by the moral support of his roommate Charles (Paul Bettany), and by the self-esteem his builds through his new love interest and future wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), Nash's work ultimately attracts secret government agent William Parcher (Ed Harris), who recruits the mathematician for work in the Department of Defense. However, Parcher, who prefers to ignore Nash's improving human relations, and who insists that a "lack of personal connection may be an advantage", presents a constant threat.

A Beautiful Mind successfully lures the viewer into the mind of a character who is portrayed as defining everything in his world in mathematical terms; it does so by offering visual representations that suggest his mental patterns. Furthermore, the film defines Nash as a character that demonstrates a potential for creating revolutionary theories that will ultimately reward his extreme dedication to this scientific field. Unfortunately, while Nasar's book explores with evident honesty his life's adversities, the film is most concerned with offering a romanticized version of the man's life. This choice lessens the impact of the numerous blows the man admirably survived, and consequently fictionalizes many aspects of the life of the real man and presents a falsified homage to Endurance. Nevertheless, A Beautiful Mind successfully envelopes the viewer in the character's almost imperceptible delusions as it subtly integrates the character's schizophrenic state to plot narration. Yet the film's most intriguing attempt may be enjoyed in a scene where Nash astonishingly manages to grasp a momentary lapse of reason within his profound madness and finds a logical means by which to overcome his mental disease and prove his extraordinary intelligence.

*Nash won the Nobel Prize for "pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of noncooperative games"; basically, the application of mathematical formulas to decision-making. (http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/economics/1994b.html).
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Review by Matthew Turner
Well-made film with some deservedly Oscar-nominated performances - it takes some shocking liberties with its subject matter but remains engaging and enjoyable throughout.

The most important thing to say about A Beautiful Mind is that the less you know about the film going in, the more you'll get out of it. Conversely, the more you find out about it after you've seen it, the more chance it has of annoying you. With this in mind, if you're planning to see it, you should probably stop reading now, safe in the knowledge that it's a well-made, entertaining film with some great performances, principally by Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe (both deservedly Oscar-nominated) and Paul Bettany.

Still here? Well, don't say we didn't warn you. Russell Crowe plays real-life mathematician Professor John Nash, a shy, bumbling man who is obsessed with making his mark on the world by finding his "one, original idea". He finds it with his invention of 'Game Theory', which, in the film's most enjoyable sequence, comes to him in a flash of inspiration while down the pub checking out girls.

The rest of the film details Nash's marriage to one of his students (Jennifer Connelly, so who can blame him?), and his gradual, incomprehending descent into mental illness, before, in one of those Oscar-baiting 'triumph over adversity'-type deals, winning the Nobel prize in later life - director Ron 'Richie Cunningham' Howard has never been one to shy away from the schmaltz and here he trowels it on in no uncertain terms.

There has already been a sizeable backlash against the film, because it purports to be a biopic, yet has left out all the more unsavoury details of Nash's life, such as his divorce from Alicia (in stark contrast to the 'inspirational love story' on screen that both stars keep banging on about in interviews), a child out of wedlock and an episode in which he was arrested for soliciting homosexual sex in a public lavatory. This is equally annoying because you can't help feeling that the story would have been all the more compelling with those elements left in.

However, it has to be said that what remains is still an engaging story, though perhaps it would have been better with an 'inspired by the story of John Nash' credit. At any rate, the acting is superb, with Crowe once again completely inhabiting a real-life character as he did in The Insider. (That said, some may find his mannered performance a little too 'Rain Man' for their tastes).

He is given excellent support by Jennifer Connelly (hopefully her Oscar nomination will finally lead to her being given the more high-profile roles that she deserves), Ed Harris as a sinister government agent and Paul Bettany (stealing the film once again, just as he did A Knight's Tale) as his Princeton room-mate and best friend.

In short, providing you know next to nothing about the film going in, it serves up decent couple of hours' worth of entertainment, delivering some terrific performances, a number of enjoyably comic moments, several moving scenes and one or two genuinely jaw-droppingly shocking moments that are extremely well-handled (and are the reason you should avoid reading much about the film beforehand).

It doesn't exactly deserve to win the Best Picture Oscar (it's the current favourite), but it is nonetheless recommended.
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Emotions by numbers

Even before the opening credits for Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind roll, the extensive previews for the movie have roused echoes of Scott Hicks' barely five-year-old Shine, the equally fictionalized-but-based-on-truth story of pianist, David Helfgott. While Howard's film avoids the temptation to "explain" the mental illness that strikes his protagonist (Princeton mathematician, John Nash) via the extensive childhood and adolescence psychiatry-by-numbers scenes in Hick's film, it's quickly apparent that the two directors view their raw material the same way. Both indulge an atavistic Romantic idolatry of tortured genius to idealize mental illness as spectacle, a feel-good gladiatorial games of the psyche where the human spirits always triumphs and love always blooms.

Howard's protagonist is based on the real Princeton mathematician John Nash (played in the film by Russell Crowe). The dazzling working-class scholar from West Virginia revolutionized economic theory in his 20s, married a beautiful and intelligent mathematics undergraduate, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), and then lost a high-profile backroom Cold Warrior career to schizophrenia. But, following biopic tradition, scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman and director Howard dwell heavily on the prelude to breakdown, the moment of breakdown and the ultimate triumph over breakdown, while glossing over the intervening decades of genuine anguish in a sequence of emotions-by-numbers impressionistic scenes. Despite the A-list acting firepower, and moments that hint tantalizingly at what this story might have been, A Beautiful Mind reduces both mathematical genius and schizophrenia to reassuring carnivals of containable eccentricity.

At first, though, Goldsman's script avoids classifying Nash (despite some crashingly obvious musical cues), allowing ambiguity about Nash's apparent idiosyncrasy: is it a function of how he is or how he is perceived? Sometimes he appears socially maladroit and intellectually isolated because of cultural displacement, his rural brusqueness and unabashed ambition scorned in the Ivy League indolence of gentlemanly competition. Sometimes he weaves across the screen as the muttering loner, drinking, living in the library for days at a time, yet saved from terminal alienation by a self-deprecating wit.

Sometimes his dissociation seems to lie in his monotheistic devotion to mathematics, his absolute faith in the power of numbers to translate chaos into clarity. In these sequences, the movie manages to illuminate both the beauty and humiliating absurdity of uninhibited intellectual obsession. In one scene, Nash is the down-at-heel buffoon mapping the feeding patterns of pigeons in the park. In another, he is the intoxicated artist scrawling mathematical equations across the library's mullioned windows. Like Nash, like his wife and his friends, the audience is lulled into a kind of perceptual blindness, in which sympathy for Nash's triumph over his social exclusion, or admiration for his unflagging ambition prevail over awareness of his deeper disintegration. Though Howard and Goldman here craft a conventional set up, they craft it well, with the nice touch of casting Christopher Plummer, an actor who has tried to obliterate Baron von Trapp in a series of roles as urbane sadists, exactly to enigmatic type as either the Russian spy seeking to abduct Nash or the kindly psychiatrist attempting to save his sanity.

Much of the power of these early sequences derives from the physicality of Crowe's embodiment of Nash. Whether hunching his shoulders after a defeat while playing Go with another student, smirking at a class of baffled undergrads, or sitting, shirt collar unbuttoned at a cluttered desk, Crowe projects an unfocussed but bristling sensuality, all the more tangible in contrast to the slender, fine-boned Connelly, and the archetypally blond and beautiful Paul Bettany (as Nash's friend, Charles). Ironically, some of the most poignant moments of Crowe's performance come as the movie abandons Nash as character and starts to invest in Nash as symbol. In this transition lies the kernel of the movie that might have been, the movie that mapped not the sensational, the onset of schizophrenia, but the quotidian, schizophrenia's grinding day-by-day, year-by-year battles for both Nash and, perhaps more remarkably, the woman who remained his wife.

This transition occupies the scenes that surround Nash's physical assault on his wife, chilling, because so mundane and domestic, in exposing the way the clash between delusion and reality precipitates violence. As Nash explores his decision to battle his delusions without excessive medication, the audience experiences for the first time the heart of his dilemma, that for him, normalcy is a world populated by familiar people who do not exist. Some are dangerous, such as the figure who incites him to attack his wife and almost precipitates her departure. Some are supportive and loving: as Nash says of one, "He's been a good friend to me." With a wry twist of his chin, Crowe adds both bashfulness (as if confessing a love affair) and an adult recognition of genuine loss to the Nash's confessions, first that he and this delusion have had some good conversations over the years and second, that he'll miss him.

But this glimpse into the future for Nash and Alicia is never more than a glimpse. Howard opts for time-lapse snapshots of Nash's subsequent life in Princeton (culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize), Crowe opts for well-costumed and heavily made-up caricature, the delusions pop up in increasingly risible formation, and Alicia disappears completely until the final scenes of the film.

For all his Capraesque aspirations, Howard's movies never really leave the ground because he never really takes any risks. Mental illness, even mental illness less catastrophic and more amenable to chemical manipulation than schizophrenia, is neither as domesticated nor (heaven help us) as uplifting as this movie claims. Howard could have told the story of John Nash and Alicia Larde as John Cassavetes told the story of Nick and Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence. But instead he played safe, and told one more story of the American dream, where a poor boy can get the girl and the gold, conquer any adversity, even schizophrenia, and not encounter any more anguish than the average multiplex audience can endure on a Saturday afternoon.