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In
A Beautiful Mind, director Ron Howard and screenwriter
Akiva Goldsman have prettied up a dark tale by delivering delusions
that are fun to hang out with. The mind of John Nash (Russell
Crowe) is crammed full of some of the most entertaining hallucinations
a schizophrenic could ever hope to find. He lives with a saucy
roommate who gets him drunk and tosses his desk out of a window.
He works for a dark father figure who gets him a cool job decoding
messages for the government. And then there's that precious
little girl who appears just when he needs a hug.
Of course,
they eventually turn on him, but it is not until Nash's illness
is revealed to friends and family that the audience sees dementia's
darker side.
Prior
to his meltdown, Nash's schizophrenia is communicated via
tics and anti-social awkwardness, overlaid with arrogance.
Since no one knows he's actually nuts, these signs are viewed
as trappings of an eccentric genius, or an actor trying very
hard to win the Oscar two years in a row. After his breakdown,
Nash's schizo status is more subtly communicated via sloppy
fashion statements, and because he carries an umbrella—even
when it's not raining!
The biggest
problem with all of this? That we must take it on faith Nash
is a genius, and this genius has made his disease all the
more devastating. The movie is promoted with the line "John
Nash was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation."
Oh, he
was?
Okay, I believe you!
Howard
briefly shows Nash's mathematical revelations via nifty visual
effects. A conversation about dating leads to pretty girls
disappearing in puffs of smoke, and lo and behold!—four
seasons of scribbling later the "Nash equilibrium"
is born. Judd Hirsch pronounces it "brilliant,"
and the next thing we know it's five years later and Nash
is heading up Wheeler Labs at MIT.
Things
seem to be going well for him. He is tic-free and hunky, and
he even has a girlfriend. Then, William Parcher (Ed Harris),
a shadowy operative with the Department of Defense, flatters
Nash by calling him the "greatest natural code-breaker"
he's ever seen, and enlists him to decipher messages and save
the world. Nash sees numbers and letters pop out of magazines
and more frantic scribbling ensues. (But this time, it signals
his descent into MADNESS!)
Although
this thrillery twist may captivate viewers more than watching
Nash teach applied calculus, ultimately, what Nash really
did, or even who he really is, is not the point of A Beautiful
Mind. He wrote a thesis while at Princeton that forty-four
years later won him the Nobel Prize in economics. In between,
he married and suffered from schizophrenia. No doubt Goldsman
and Howard felt any more reality would not serve the story
of intrigue and espionage and love and redemption they were
cooking up. Fair enough, but I would have liked to have seen
more of the young, arrogant, brilliant Nash, and less of the
cloak and dagger trickery that leaves poor Ed Harris with
not much to do but glower from under a black fedora.
Thank
goodness for Jennifer Connelly, who not only saves Nash (as
only the love of a good woman can do in a movie) but she nearly
saves A Beautiful Mind as well. While her screen time
is limited and she is forced to say lines like "I have
to believe something extraordinary can happen," Connelly,
as Nash's wife Alicia, is able to transcend the golden glow
of Howard's Oscar bait and bring some gravity to this fable,
without weighing it down.
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