A
Beautiful Mind BY ROGER EBERT / December 21, 2001
The Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches at Princeton,
and walks to campus every day. That these commonplace statements
nearly brought tears to my eyes suggests the power of "A Beautiful
Mind," the story of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians,
and a victim of schizophrenia. Nash's discoveries in game theory
have an impact on our lives every day. He also believed for a time
that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page
of the New York Times.
"A Beautiful Mind" stars Russell Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer
Connelly as his wife, Alicia, who is pregnant with their child when
the first symptoms of his disease become apparent. It tells the
story of a man whose mind was of enormous service to humanity while
at the same time betrayed him with frightening delusions. Crowe
brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and
building with small behavioral details. He shows a man who descends
into madness and then, unexpectedly, regains the ability to function
in the academic world. Nash has been compared to Newton, Mendel
and Darwin, but was also for many years just a man muttering to
himself in the corner.
Director Ron Howard is able to suggest a core of goodness in Nash
that inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope
and, in her words in his darkest hour, "to believe that something
extraordinary is possible." The movie's Nash begins as a quiet
but cocky young man with a West Virginia accent, who gradually turns
into a tortured, secretive paranoid who believes he is a spy being
trailed by government agents. Crowe, who has an uncanny ability
to modify his look to fit a role, always seems convincing as a man
who ages 47 years during the film.
The early Nash, seen at Princeton in the late 1940s, calmly tells
a scholarship winner "there is not a single seminal idea on
either of your papers." When he loses at a game of Go, he explains:
"I had the first move. My play was perfect. The game is flawed."
He is aware of his impact on others ("I don't much like people
and they don't much like me") and recalls that his first-grade
teacher said he was "born with two helpings of brain and a
half-helping of heart." It is Alicia who helps him find the
heart. She is a graduate student when they meet, is attracted to
his genius, is touched by his loneliness, is able to accept his
idea of courtship when he informs her, "Ritual requires we
proceed with a number of platonic activities before we have sex."
To the degree that he can be touched, she touches him, although
often he seems trapped inside himself; Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the
1998 biography that informs Akiva Goldsman's screenplay, begins
her book by quoting Wordsworth about "a man forever voyaging
through strange seas of Thought, alone." Nash's schizophrenia
takes a literal, visual form. He believes he is being pursued by
a federal agent (Ed Harris), and imagines himself in chase scenes
that seem inspired by 1940s crime movies. He begins to find patterns
where no patterns exist. One night he and Alicia stand under the
sky and he asks her to name any object, and then connects stars
to draw it. Romantic, but it's not so romantic when she discovers
his office thickly papered with countless bits torn from newspapers
and magazines and connected by frantic lines into imaginary patterns.
The movie traces his treatment by an understanding psychiatrist
(Christopher Plummer), and his agonizing courses of insulin shock
therapy. Medication helps him improve somewhat--but only, of course,
when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more effective,
and he begins a tentative re-entry into the academic world at Princeton.
The movie fascinated me about the life of this man, and I sought
more information, finding that for many years he was a recluse,
wandering the campus, talking to no one, drinking coffee, smoking
cigarettes, paging through piles of newspapers and magazines. And
then one day he paid a quite ordinary compliment to a colleague
about his daughter, and it was noticed that Nash seemed better.
There is a remarkable scene in the movie when a representative
for the Nobel committee (Austin Pendleton) comes visiting, and hints
that he is being "considered" for the prize. Nash observes
that people are usually informed they have won, not that they are
being considered: "You came here to find out if I am crazy
and would screw everything up if I won." He did win, and did
not screw everything up.
The movies have a way of pushing mental illness into corners. It
is grotesque, sensational, cute, funny, willful, tragic or perverse.
Here it is simply a disease, which renders life almost but not quite
impossible for Nash and his wife, before he becomes one of the lucky
ones to pull out of the downward spiral.
When he won the Nobel, Nash was asked to write about his life,
and he was honest enough to say his recovery is "not entirely
a matter of joy." He observes: "Without his 'madness,'
Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions
or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten."
Without his madness, would Nash have also lived and then been forgotten?
Did his ability to penetrate the most difficult reaches of mathematical
thought somehow come with a price attached? The movie does not know
and cannot say.
******************************
United States, 2001
U.S. Release Date: beginning 12/21/01 (limited); 1/4/02 (wider)
Running Length: 2:12
MPAA Classification: PG-13 (Profanity, sexual situations, violence)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Seen at: Ritz East, Philadelphia Cast: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris,
Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Vivien Cardone,
Judd Hirsch, Josh Lucas, Anthony Rapp, Christopher Plummer
Director: Ron Howard
Producers: Ron Howard, Brian Grazer
Screenplay: Akiva Goldsman, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar
Cinematography: Roger Deakins
Music: James Horner
U.S. Distributor: Universal Pictures
A
Beautiful Mind is a beautifully written, effectively acted,
and meticulously crafted effort that is likely to remind many viewers
of a simple axiom: a movie doesn't have to be groundbreaking to
be compelling. Originality is a prized commodity because there is
so little of it in Hollywood these days, but, when filmmakers do
such a skillful job with familiar elements, their efforts should
be acknowledged. Affecting without being overtly manipulative, A
Beautiful Mind tells the life story of John Nash, a Nobel prize
winner who struggled through most of his adult life with schizophrenia.
As directed by Ron Howard, this becomes a tale not only of one man's
battle to overcome his own disability, but of the overreaching power
of love - a theme that has been embraced by films as diverse as
It's a Wonderful Life and Rocky.
A Beautiful Mind may have been developed to be a crowd-pleaser
as well as a tear-jerker, but genuine craft is evident in the way
the pieces were assembled. The movie never becomes cloying, nor
does it threaten to drown us beneath an outpouring of false sentiment.
This is no Patch Adams, filled with saccharine-coated artificiality.
The characters are effectively drawn and their plight touches an
emotional chord. A Beautiful Mind offers a catharsis without insulting
the intelligence. Sadly, too few movies these days can make a similar
claim. This film argues that there are still instances when Hollywood-produced,
big budget movies are worth a viewer's investment of time and money.
A Beautiful Mind purports to tell the true story of Professor John
Nash (Russell Crowe), but, while the gross facts may be accurate,
one must expect embellishment of the details. Narrative features
are not constrained by the same rules that limit documentaries.
We first meet Nash as a student at Princeton in 1947. He is brilliant
but erratic - a mathematical genius who lacks social skills. He
is aided in making it through those difficult years by his roommate,
Charles (Paul Bettany). Years later, following an astounding breakthrough
that revolutionizes economics, John is teaching at M.I.T. and doing
code-breaking work for a shady government agent, William Parcher
(Ed Harris). It's at this time that John meets, falls in love with,
and marries Alicia (Jennifer Connelly). But his happy world soon
starts to crumble. John is afflicted with paranoid hallucinations;
by the time he is taken to a mental hospital under the care of the
mysterious Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer), he is diagnosed as having
an advanced case of schizophrenia.
For
Russell Crowe, the winner of last year's Best Actor Oscar, this
is another opportunity to broaden his range. Crowe successfully
buries his personality beneath Nash's, allowing the character to
come to the fore (a necessity, considering the actor's current load
of off-screen baggage). Much as he did in The Insider, Crowe shows
no difficulty inhabiting the skin of a real-life individual who
has a stronger intellect than physique. And, when it comes to the
sequences depicting Nash battling his demons, Crowe's performance
is utterly convincing. Meanwhile, Jennifer Connelly is luminous
as Alicia. Although the showier performance belongs to Crowe, it
is Connelly's complex work, depicting a woman torn by love for and
fear of the same man, that elevates the film to a higher level.
The actress was unjustly overlooked for Requiem for a Dream; hopefully,
the Academy will not repeat that mistake. Solid support is provided
by Ed Harris and Christopher Plummer.
A viewer certainly doesn't have to be a mathematical expert to
appreciate what A Beautiful Mind offers, although those with a strong
left-brain component may relate better to John Nash than right-brainers.
The movie tosses mathematical theories and theorems in the audience's
direction, but explains them simply and lucidly; no one is going
to become lost or bored. A Beautiful Mind isn't about mathematics
except as a symbol. It's about human frailty and the ability to
triumph over it. Nash could just as easily be a doctor, a lawyer,
or a construction worker and the essence of the story would not
change.
The strength of the writing and production values elevate A Beautiful
Mind far above "disease of the week movie" quality. At
the core of the picture lies the relationship between John and Alicia,
and the tribulations that the strength of their bond allows them
to overcome. On one occasion, a friend asks Alicia how she can continue
to stay with her stricken husband, and she replies with a succinct
explanation that everyone who has ever been in love will understand.
A Beautiful Mind defies the conventional Hollywood wisdom that love
is passion and romance. For John and Alicia, it is painful, heartbreaking
work. And, while hearts and flowers are great for a fantasy, this
is the kind of expression of emotion that touches a deeper chord.
© 2001 James Berardinelli
Crowe
brings to 'Mind' a great performance
By Mike Clark, USA TODAY
12/20/2001 - Updated 03:52 PM ET
Unlike Sylvia Nasar's splendid same-name biography, the factually
sandpapered screen version of A Beautiful Mind is merely inspired
by the traumatic life of mathematics genius and Nobel Prize winner
John Nash. That said, this is one inspiring movie despite extremely
tricky subject matter — better than Shine and among the most
affecting ever made about co-existing with mental demons.
It'll soon be very clear that when Russell Crowe won the Oscar
for Gladiator, he got it for the wrong movie. Playing a diagnosed
paranoid schizophrenic described early on as having "two helpings
of brain and half a helping of heart," Crowe somehow makes
himself — through personality and especially body language
— a viable screen hero, even though his lack of social graces
often puts him on the outs with his crowd. If there's no logical
reason why any woman, particularly if she's played by Jennifer Connelly,
should be crazy about this guy from almost the moment she meets
him, dynamic performances and extraordinary actor chemistry make
us buy it.
We even buy it during the story's stormy years, which follow MIT
instructor Nash's marriage to a back-row physics student before
undertaking undercover Cold War work for the government. As Nash's
murky government contact, Ed Harris at first seems too much the
prototypical mystery-man-in-a-fedora to be fully convincing. Later,
though, we see that his characterization is a creative device used
by director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who also
found a clever way (it involves a blonde in a barroom) to explain
Nash's Nobel-celebrated game theory. If they still don't quite succeed
in making the theory clear to a brain-dead math dunce like me ...
well, Nasar didn't, either.
Nash's real life is full of byways the movie doesn't address, such
as his apparent bisexuality and an out-of-wedlock child he fathered
before meeting his wife. But whereas most biopics trip over bulging
plot as they try to jam in every key detail, this one maintains
dramatic focus for more than two hours by, in part, jettisoning
messy baggage the filmmakers were probably happy to ignore.
Though the pre-Ransom rap on Howard was that he wasn't edgy enough,
this movie (despite its gloss-overs) gets harrowing before its deservedly
upbeat finale; imagine what you'd feel for Jack Nicholson's character
in The Shining if you felt sorry for his predicament instead of
reveling in it.
Beautiful Mind is Howard's best movie after Apollo 13, and it immediately
follows his charmless — though commercially successful —
children's movie from a year ago. To adult moviegoers, at least,
the Grinch has given Christmas back.
Nash,
Jr. experienced it all. A mathematical genius, he made an astonishing
discovery early in his career and stood on the brink of international
acclaim. But the handsome and arrogant Nash soon found himself on
a painful and harrowing journey of self-discovery. After many years
of struggle, he eventually triumphed over his tragedy, and finally
- late in life - received the Nobel Prize. (summary written by Universal
Pictures & Dreamworks Pictues)
the
story; he had previosuly worked as a child care counselor and had
developed a method for training mental health workers, and had also
grown up in a house where his parents had established a group home
for emotionally disturbed children.