A Beautiful Mind

The late Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. used to teach at Princeton, and walked to campus every day. Roger Ebert said in his review, “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 human society every day. He also believed for some time that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page of the New York Times.

“A Beautiful Mind,” released in 2001, stars Russell Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer Connelly as his late wife, Alicia, who is pregnant with their son when the first signs of schizophrenia became apparent. It tells the story of a man whose mind was a huge help to society while at the same time torturing him with scary delusions. Ebert said, “Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details.” He shows a man who falls into insanity before, suddenly, bouncing back to work in the academic world. Nash has been compared to Newton, Mendel and Darwin, but was also for many years just a man talking to himself in the corner.

Director Ron Howard is able to show an amount of goodness in Nash that inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope and, in her words in his worst time, “to believe that something extraordinary is possible.” The movie’s Nash begins as a quiet but overconfident young man with a West Virginia accent, who slowly turns into an afflicted, mysterious paranoid who believes he is a spy being followed by government agents. Crowe, who has a mysterious way to change his look to fit a role, always seems convincing as a man who ages 47 years during the film.

The young 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 remembers 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, falls in love to his genius, feels for his loneliness, is able to accept his idea of marriage when he tells her, “Ritual requires we proceed with a number of platonic activities before he make love.” To the point that he can be touched, she touches him, despite often he looks trapped inside himself. Ebert noted, “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 chased by a federal agent, played by Ed Harris, and imagines himself in chase scenes that resemble those from 1940s crime movies. He begins to find patters 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 sees his office heavily papered with many articles torn from newspapers and magazines and connected by uptight lines into imaginary patters.

The movie follows his treatment by an understanding psychiatrist, played by Christopher Plummer, and his struggling courses of insulin shock therapy. Medication helps him improve a bit – but only, obviously, when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more powerful, and he begins a hesitant re-entry into the academic world at Princeton.

Ebert said, “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.” One day he paid a very ordinary compliment to a coworker about his daughter, and it was noticed that Nash looked better.

There is a great scene in the movie when a representative for the Nobel committee, played by Austin Pendleton, comes visiting, and hints that he is being “considered” for the prize. Nash sees that people are usually told 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 not focusing too much on mental illness. It is bizarre, sensational, cute, funny, stubborn, tragic or wicked. Here it is simply a disease, which leaves life almost but not quite impossible for Nash and his wife, before he comes one of the lucky ones to pull out of the hole he falls in.

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 sees: “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 enter the most difficult parts of mathematical thought somehow come with a price to pay? The movie does not know and cannot say.

This is definitely one of the best biographical films ever made. See it if you haven’t, especially to those who have researched and know about the life of John Nash and his impact on the mathematical and scientific society. Crowe and Connelly were great in this role and I don’t know who else could have played these roles, but it was a job well done. Like I said, don’t read this review, go out and see it because it has to be seen to be believed and you’re missing out on a great biographical movie.

Look out next week when we look at another adaptation in “Russell Crowe Month.”