From Math to Madness, and Back
By A.O. Scott
The New York Times, 12/21/01
"A Beautiful Mind," her biography of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., Sylvia Nasar quotes one of his colleagues: "All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes." Mr. Nash, whose life is a case study in the difficulty -- and also the wonder -- of living in both, now inhabits a third: the treacle palace of middlebrow Hollywood moviemaking, in which ambiguity is dissolved in reassuring platitudes and freshly harvested tears.
The tears, and the dazzled glow that accompanies them, feel honestly earned. The paradox of Ron Howard's new film, from a script by Akiva Goldsman, is that the story that elicits these genuine emotions is almost entirely counterfeit.
At one point, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), the M.I.T. student who will marry Nash, breezes into his office, brandishing a proof she has devised for a fiendishly difficult hypothesis. Her professor and future husband looks up from the paper coffee cup he is chewing on and glances at her work. "It's elegant, but wrong," he says, delivering a verdict that could just as well apply to "A Beautiful Mind."
Let's work backward, from wrong to elegant. Mr. Nash, now 73, an inordinately gifted, deeply awkward man, possesses one of the most extraordinary mathematical intellects of his generation. By his early 30's, when mental illness overwhelmed his creative powers, he had done important work in a number of fields, including game theory, quantum mechanics and number theory. After three decades of struggle with schizophrenia, he was granted what seemed like a miraculous remission. In 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic science for work he had done as a graduate student at Princeton in the late 1940's.
In outline then Mr. Nash's life has the perfect three-act structure of a screenplay: a sparkling career derailed by adversity and redeemed by a triumph of the spirit. In detail the life, as recounted by Ms. Nasar, a former economics reporter for The New York Times, is a trove of fascinating, troubling information. In a profession whose members have a reputation for oddness, Mr. Nash was a prime number. He was notorious among his colleagues for his antisocial temperament and his predilection for cruel put-downs and dangerous practical jokes.
Before he married Alicia, with whom he had a son named John, he fathered another child, also named John, with a woman named Eleanor Stiers, and abandoned both mother and child to poverty. He formed a number of intense, apparently sexual bonds with other men, and he lost his security clearance and his position at the RAND Corporation after he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men's room in Santa Monica, Calif. When his illness became intractable and his behavior intolerable, Alicia divorced him. (They remarried last June.)
None of this has made it to the screen. Worse, the intellectual and political context that would throw both Mr. Nash's genius and his madness into high relief has been obliterated. "A Beautiful Mind" opens with a speech by the fictitious Professor Helinger (Judd Hirsch), declaring that American mathematicians, having played an important part in the defeat of Nazi Germany, must now turn their attention to defeating Soviet Communism.
This scene, and much of the story that follows, egregiously simplifies the tangled, suspicious world of cold war academia. More than a few mathematicians and scientists at the time, including many at M.I.T., where Nash went to teach after Princeton (not, as the film has it, to conduct top-secret defense-related research), were sympathetic to Communism, and many more (including Robert Oppenheimer, whose name is mentioned in passing) were suspected of such sympathies. While Mr. Nash was not among them, he was hardly the intrepid cold warrior depicted by Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman. Even at RAND, the Defense Department think tank, he was more interested in pure research than in its application, and in 1960 he tried to renounce his United States citizenship to express his belief in the necessity of world government.
All this, apparently, is too much for audiences to take in: anything that would dilute our sympathy by acquainting us with the vicissitudes of Mr. Nash's real life has been airbrushed away, leaving a portrait of a shy, lovable genius. Of course any movie that traffics in biography must edit, foreshorten, emphasize and condense, but "A Beautiful Mind" goes further, becoming a piece of historical revisionism on the order of "J. F. K." or "Forrest Gump," and manifesting a depressing lack of faith in the intelligence of the audience.
How much fidelity do movies owe to the historical figures they purport to be about? This question tends to interest the people who write about movies more than the people who make them. It does not, in any case, seem to have troubled Mr. Howard for a moment. But without stifling the objections noted above -- and without giving credence to the trivializing, anti-intellectual rebuttal that it's only a movie (only, as opposed to what?) -- "A Beautiful Mind" deserves to be judged on its own terms. Perhaps, adapting the conventions of mathematical notation, the movie character should be thought of as "Nash prime" or Nashi (i referring to an imaginary number). The story of this Nash is not without its beauty.
There is, for one thing, Ms. Connelly, keen and spirited in the underwritten role of a woman who starts out as a math groupie and soon finds herself the helpmeet of a disturbed, difficult man. The rest of the supporting cast members Ñ including Ed Harris as a government agent, Christopher Plummer as a sinister psychiatrist, Paul Bettany as an English dandy and Josh Lucas as a preening math jock Ñ almost manage to keep their characters from becoming a parade of ciphers. Roger Deakins's characteristically elegant cinematography turns the postwar Princeton campus into a honey-toned Arcadia.
But above all there is the fierce presence of Mr. Crowe, who refuses every temptation to overact the role set before him. Too often the chance to depict genius or mental disorder is taken, even by gifted actors like Dustin Hoffman ("Rain Man") and Geoffrey Rush ("Shine"), as a license to show off.
Mr. Crowe, with his superhuman powers of concentration, shows us a man who dwells almost entirely in an inner world, and he dramatizes that inwardness as if nobody were watching. A faint smile plays across Nash's mouth, and his speech is whispery and halting, with a suggestion of the South in its cadences. (Mr. Nash grew up in West Virginia.) As always with Mr. Crowe, you never feel that these are actorly mannerisms; they seem instead to arise from a deep absorption in the logic of the character.
In tackling the problem of how to bring us at least partway into Nash's mind, Mr. Howard has come up with a clever conceit, as simple as it is inspired. Asked why he believed the wild delusions that characterized his illness, Mr. Nash replied that it was because they came to him "the same way that my mathematical ideas did." Rather than spoil the elaborate surprise Mr. Howard has concocted, I will note that he has found an accessible cinematic way to present this insight. (He also finds an entertaining way to convey the content of some of Mr. Nash's mathematical insights; the theory that won him the Nobel is presented as a strategy for picking up women at a student bar.)
The hallucinations that increasingly plague Nash occupy the same reality as everything else. Schizophrenia does not announce itself as such to those it afflicts. Mr. Howard leads us into its infernal reality without posting a sign on the door, and the character's way out of it seems at least metaphorically true to the real Mr. Nash's account of his remission. "I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation," Mr. Nash wrote in a 1994 autobiographical essay.
Like his real-life counterpart, the movie Nash is impatient with detail- oriented hack work, preferring to search out "governing dynamics." The governing dynamic of "A Beautiful Mind" is sentimentality of a familiar and not altogether unwelcome kind. The movie can Ñ indeed, should Ñ be intellectually rejected, but you can't quite banish it from your mind.
"A Beautiful Mind" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some upsetting scenes and mild sexual content.
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
Directed by Ron Howard; written by Akiva Goldsman, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Mike Hill and Dan Hanley; music by James Horner; production designer, Wynn Thomas; produced by Brian Grazer and Mr. Howard; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 129 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.
WITH: Russell Crowe (John Forbes Nash Jr.), Ed Harris (Parcher), Jennifer Connelly (Alicia Nash), Paul Bettany (Charles), Adam Goldberg (Sol), Judd Hirsch (Helinger), Josh Lucas (Hansen), Anthony Rapp (Bender) and Christopher Plummer (Dr. Rosen).
Copyright The New York Times 2001. (Thanks to Di)
Film Review-Beautiful Mind,
At the Movies: 'A Beautiful Mind'
By Christy Lemire
AP Entertainment Writer *
Ron Howard finally got it right.
With “A Beautiful Mind,” Howard achieves the balance that has eluded him for years in directing sappy, feel-good movies such as “Cocoon” and “Parenthood.” He manages to evoke genuine emotion from the audience without schmaltz.
“A Beautiful Mind” is Howard’s best movie, and easily one of the best movies of the year.
It also features the strongest performance we’ve seen yet from Russell Crowe, who proves increasingly more versatile with each role he takes.
As tortured math genius John Forbes Nash Jr., Crowe’s transformation is stunning — reminiscent of the one he pulled off two years ago in “The Insider,” but even more effective because Nash’s story is so much more personal. It’s almost too bad that he won the best-actor Oscar last year for “Gladiator,” because he deserves the award even more for his work here.
Based on the biography of the same name by Sylvia Nasar, “A Beautiful Mind”
follows Nash from the late 1940s at Princeton, where he studied mathematics with some of the world’s greatest minds, through his battle with schizophrenia, and ends in 1994, when his game theory earned him the Nobel Prize.
Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman takes some liberties with Nash’s story; he condenses several characters, and omits the fact that Nash had a mistress with whom he had a child, for example. But Goldsman stays true to the basic course of Nash’s life.
With his West Virginia drawl, manic tics and standoffish demeanor, Nash stands out from his peers at Princeton. He’s almost proud of being anti-social, and his sly, subtle put-downs don’t exactly endear him to anyone. When a classmate at a party mistakes him for a waiter, Nash quips, “I imagine you’re getting quite used to miscalculation.” His one friend is his charismatic British roommate, Charles (Paul Bettany).
Nash rarely attends class, instead spending his days searching frantically for one truly original idea. The theory he eventually concocts about competition contradicts a century and a half of economic thought, and earns him a research and teaching spot at MIT.
One day, government agent William Parcher (an appropriately mysterious Ed Harris) approaches him on campus and recruits him for a top-secret code-cracking project at the height of the Cold War.
Soon afterward, Nash meets the other most influential person in his life: Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), a student who will become his wife. She’s bold and self-assured; he’s instantly intrigued, in his own awkward way. His idea of courting is telling her during a romantic picnic, “All I really want is to have intercourse with you as soon as possible.”
He can’t tell Alicia what he’s doing for the government: spending days scouring newspapers and magazines for codes he believes the Russians have hidden for each other.
The project becomes his obsession, but it becomes increasingly difficult for him to discern reality from imagination. He ends up in a hospital, where Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer) diagnoses him with schizophrenia.
The saddest part of the movie is watching Nash struggle with his own mind; once his strength, it’s now his liability. He recognizes when he’s delusional and thinks he knows how to stop it — it’s just like solving a math problem, he figures.
Aging on screen over a period of nearly 50 years, Crowe turns Nash from a swaggering genius to a shaken shell of a man, and the disintegration is believable and compelling.
While this is Crowe’s movie, Connelly stands equal as his devoted wife; Alicia stays married to the man she thought she knew, until he once again becomes theman she knew she loved. Connelly has always chosen unusual roles in independent films; this performance should give her the recognition she’s deserved all along.
James Horner’s score provides just the right combination of the wonder of discovery and the hint of something sinister.
And the cinematography from frequent Coen brothers collaborator Roger Deakins (he also shot their stunning black-and-white noir thriller “The Man Who Wasn’t There”) gives the film a dreamlike look, perfect for delving into such a complicated topic as the human mind.
"A Beautiful Mind"
By Kirk Honeycutt
The Hollywood Reporter (12/01)
"A Beautiful Mind" is practically a one-man show, but Russell Crowe makes it an entertaining one. While the movie fails to flesh out its other characters and at times reduces mental illness to cartoonish antics, director Ron Howard and his star focus ruthlessly on a single objective: imagining the mental voyage of John Nash Jr., a mathematical prodigy diagnosed at the peak of his career as a paranoid-schizophrenic.
Clearly this is tricky material. Consequently, the film from Imagine Entertainment, produced by Universal and DreamWorks, at best can anticipate only moderate success for distributor Universal. Much is riding on Crowe's star power.
Adapted by Akiva Goldsman from Sylvia Nasar' s biography, "Mind" wants to see events, as much as possible, from Nash' s point of view. This forces the filmmakers to flimflam the audience by presenting scenes and characters in a straightforward biopic manner that we realize later are delusions. This pays off, though, by giving us a keen appreciation for John' s emotional stake in the veracity of his delusions and his unwillingness to acknowledge the illness.
John is an odd bird from the start. Arriving at Princeton in 1947 to take up a graduate fellowship, the mathematical genius from West Virginia is a blunt, eccentric man with no talent for social interaction. "I don' t like people much," he explains.
John has complete confidence in his genius, though. But as the school year wears on, his search for "one original idea" proves fruitless, causing his adviser (Judd Hirsch) to despair. Sometimes he even comes out on the short end in a rivalry with a student named Hansen (Josh Lucas). While John eventually makes friends with two students, Sol (Adam Goldberg) and Bender (Anthony Rapp), his one loyal pal is roommate Charles (Paul Bettany).
Finally, John stumbles across his original idea, and the path to scientific glory seems certain. Five years later, while an instructor at M.I.T., he meets a beautiful physics major, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), who finds his quirks endearing. Following an unorthodox courtship, they marry. He then goes to work on a secret assignment for the Pentagon and an elusive spy (Ed Harris): breaking the code for messages sent by the Soviets to operatives inside the United States.
What no one yet realizes is that John' s mind is falling apart. Soon a Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer) is plunging a needle into his arm and rushing him to a psychiatric hospital. Electroshock therapy rids him of delusions, but he returns home unable to work or participate in his marriage. When he stops taking medication, the delusions return.
Courageously, Alicia supports John when he resists further hospitalization. Gradually, he learns how to reject some delusions intellectually. So when, in 1994, he receives a Nobel Prize in economics, he can honestly say he never would have survived without Alicia.
Crowe lifts this outlandish character from the cliches of mental illness and personalizes him in theatrical but telling ways. Much of this is done with his body, seemingly not always in John' s control. His movements are those of a man dwelling comfortably in his mind, letting the body take care of itself; when he loses confidence in that mind, he crumbles physically and mentally.
This persuasive, dominating performance leaves the rest of the characters on the periphery. The major drawback is Alicia; while Connelly gives a grounded, effective performance, she is written sketchily by Goldsman. We never even learn that Alicia is an immigrant from El Salvador or what her work entails. And following the couple' s marriage, hers becomes a totally reactive role.
Searching for a visual representation of John' s delusions, Goldsman and Howard come up with three people -- figments of his imagination -- who follow the mathematician around for years. This becomes such an awkward gimmick that one almost expects to hear John mutter, "I see fake people."
Production values are terrific. Roger Deakins' cinematography opens the film with earth tones, all beige and brown, then gradually darkens the palette as John deteriorates. The makeup department has aged the two key actors marvelously. James Horner contributes music that at times sounds like Philip Glass, a perfect fit for a man ahead of the curve but engaged in a rear-guard action against a deadly enemy.
One of the definitions of genius is the ability to see intricate patterns in what others only see as random events.
Unfortunately it' s one of the definitions of paranoia, too.
The line between the two can be dangerously thin. Look at a page of numbers and intuit an intricate connection among them and you could have a chair at M.I.T.; discover a devilish government plot to use you for secret spy research, and you could have a bed in an asylum.
The paths aren' t even mutually exclusive, as Ron Howard' s new, earnest "A Beautiful Mind" points out. Based loosely on the life of Princeton professor John Forbes Nash Jr., it' s the story of a raw mathematical genius, a backwoods prodigy who revolutionized game theory. It' s also the story of a paranoid schizophrenic who lost decades to delusions, and only received true acclaim for his breakthroughs years after the fact.
"A Beautiful Mind" features a strong performance by Russell Crowe. Because it was shot in sequence, it also features an inadvertent lesson in acting; attentive viewers can hear how his awkward accent becomes more polished, can watch as he grows into the physicality of the role.
Those early scenes also feature some nice direction from Howard. Howard has, not surprisingly given his past, always been an actor' s director; he' s fine with strong ensemble casts (as in "The Paper," "Cocoon" and "Apollo 13"), worse with special-effects stories (as in the muddled "Backdraft," or last year' s ugly, overdone "Grinch.") He' d much rather let the performers star than the camera.
Yet "A Beautiful Mind" elegantly uses photography for small, nice effects early on. When Nash is lost looking at geometric patterns, they dance across the screen of their own accord; when he looks at a page of numbers, digits float up to greet him. It' s a smart visual, both suggesting the abstract joys of thought and the visual hallucinations to come.
It' s when Nash' s delusions truly take hold, however -- when a more image-oriented director would be most purely in his element -- that Howard falters. And rather than letting us discover this mathematician' s hallucinations for ourselves, Akiva Goldsman' s script quickly pushes things too far, setting up situations that play not as nightmares but as mere improbable, pulp-fiction cliches.
That doesn't detract from Crowe' s eventually very fine performance, or Jennifer Connelly' s solid work as his extraordinarily understanding wife. But it does slow things down for a bit -- until the film, suddenly reaching its end, begins to speed them up again, hurtling us over 30 years in minutes. At one moment Crowe is on a ' 60s campus; in the next he' s shuffling about in old-age make-up.
"A Beautiful Mind" is a fascinating story, and should have been a fascinating film. It' s still, with its flaws, a worthy and intriguing one. But this is one of those rare movies that actually needed an extra quarter-hour of running time, and one of those special projects that truly required a visualist. Wild flights of fancy tortured John Nash for years; the least revenge he could get now would be to have a director harness them to serve his story.
(Rated R. The film contains strong language and gruesome medical procedures.)
'Mind' Matters, But Bio Not As Beautiful As It Could Have Been
By Glenn Whipp
c. 2001 Los Angeles Daily News
Dec. 19, 2001 (3 stars)
"A Beautiful Mind" is an apt title for Ron Howard' s well-crafted biopic of math genius John Forbes Nash Jr., a one-time prodigy who overcame a debilitating bout with schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize in 1994. The film' s greatest achievement lies in its ability to vividly convey both Nash' s genius and madness, taking us on an interior roller coaster ride that' s every bit as wild as anything you' d find at a theme park.
We first meet Nash (Russell Crowe) in 1947 as he arrives at Princeton, a surly loner from West Virginia intent on finding one original idea that will confirm his genius. Nash is described as having "two helpings of brain, but only half a heart," so it' s left to his gregarious roommate (Paul Bettany, so good as Chaucer in "A Knight' s Tale") to remind him to eat and occasionally have a beer with his fellow wunderkinds.
Success follows, and five years later, while teaching physics at MIT, Nash meets a student, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), who brings out his tender side. Nash' s intellect acquires such a reputation that even the defense department comes calling, asking him to help break a top-secret Russian code. Soon Nash is meeting regularly with a shadowy spy (Ed Harris) and spending most of his free time poring over U.S. periodicals in order to intercept clandestine Soviet messages.
And then things really get weird. Nash' s beautiful mind turns ugly, paranoia ensues and schizophrenia is diagnosed. The last half of the film is spent with Nash and his colleagues trying to pick up the pieces while Alicia deals with the drama of day-to-day life with a man who wasn' t that easy to live with when he was mentally sound.
There are some surprises in Akiva Goldsman's screenplay where not everything is as it seems. (It' s a theme in movies this year, isn' t it?) But Goldsman' s script is also too pat, often hammering home its poignant moments and overusing a device that illustrates Nash' s mental condition. And for all the talk about Connelly' s performance, it' s a woefully underwritten role, one that' s primarily reactive in nature.
Howard, one of Hollywood' s most expert craftsmen, has surrounded himself with a great team, including cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose superlative work on the Coens' inky "The Man Who Wasn' t There" will likely overshadow his fine effort here. (Watch the colors darken as Nash descends into dementia.) Another veteran, composer James Horner, contributes a score that lyrically illustrates the fragility of Nash' s condition.
Of course, nothing conveys Nash' s journey better than Crowe' s acting, which transcends the script' s simplistic weaknesses to give us a remarkably believable portrait of a man coping with the loss of his pride and joy -- his intellect. If "A Beautiful Mind" too often smooths the edges of a difficult life (Nash' s bisexuality and divorce from his wife are ignored), Crowe doggedly resists resorting to acting cliches to show the man' s pain and terror. His work here is indeed a thing of beauty.
On to A Beautiful Mind: Reviews Page Two
Back to A Beautiful Mind
