*** (out of ****)
Starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, and Christopher Plummer.
Directed by Ron “Opie” Howard and written by Akiva Goldman, from the novel by Sylvia Nasar.
2001 R
“A Beautiful Mind” is the good-but-not-great Hollywood movie being showered with awards in 2001. It affirms love, loyalty, and genius, features exceptional performances by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, and is a well-crafted mainstream film with emotional music during all the typical emotional cues. What’s remarkable about “A Beautiful Mind” is how seriously it treats mental illness, instead of just as a gimmick or a plot convenience, and how much sympathy I now feel (and hope to continue to feel) for the mentally ill.
Russell Crowe plays John Nash, a brilliant, real-life mathematician with lousy social skills. He’s not a nerd in the traditional sense; he just has little use for social rituals he doesn’t understand. As a student at Princeton in the 1940s, he approaches a girl in a bar and says “let’s pretend I’ve gone through everything I’ve needed to go through for us to make a fluid transfer.” She slaps him, and in a larger sense, Princeton slaps him when he sees no reason to commit to the social rituals of classes or grades, and instead works alone on his mathematical theory. At least Princeton tries to slap him, until his theory turns out to be genius, and five years later he’s a codebreaker for the Pentagon in the 1950s. It’s while working at the Pentagon that a government agent (Ed Harris) approaches him to help decode secret messages being sent by the Soviets to operatives in the United States. The paranoia inherent in this work eventually makes Nash’s schitzophrenia apparent, and he enters the long and emotionally painful process of recuperation, relapse, and being unable to tell reality from delusions.
Nash’s battle with madness is powerful and his wife’s (Jennifer Connelly) resolve to stick by him is an equal match. At the beginning of the film, he is almost a machine, only interested in numbers and equations, with no humanity save the infantile urge to prove that he’s better than everyone else, but his sickness humbles him and shows him how to be a person. We see why he relapses into these relationships with imaginary people after so much time spent alone, and we sympathize with him, and we feel that, when he wins the Nobel Prize in 1994 for Economics, he has gained the humanity also necessary to truly deserve such an award.
What “A Beautiful Mind” lacks, however, is much understanding for what Nash’s life’s work really is. Being the son of a mathematician, I can claim maybe one miniscule grain of insight into the awe a mathematician feels for the abilities of numbers. Nothing, it seems, is more ordered than math, and in that order is the beauty of an infinite amount of perfect crystals. Most people only see the cut, dry, and boring aspects of arithmetic, and while “A Beautiful Mind” may strengthen our understanding for schitzophrenia, it does not do the same for higher mathematics. There are about only two scenes in the movie where any attempt is made for us to grasp what he does for a living. First, and most entertaining, he reconstructs Adam Smith’s basic law of economics, using guys trying to score with blondes in a bar as an analogy. This scene is both playful and insightful. Next, at the Pentagon, he stares at a code for a long time, then tells the army brass he has translated it. While the scene is dramatic, we are not even allowed to glimpse his brilliance. We are only told that Nash is a genius, again and again. We never get to see for ourselves.
Having read this, you may be asking yourself right now, well, who the hell cares about the math involved? But math, alongside overcoming his illness, is the work of John Nash’s life, and his devotion to his numbers may well have helped him overcome his illness. Glossing over the beauty of his profession is no different than making a movie about Mozart in which we hear none of his music. Reflect on the wall-to-wall Mozart music featured, uncut, in Milos Forman’s 1984 masterpiece “Amadeus,” and reflect how anyone leaving “Amadeus” saying “I don’t know what’s so great about that Mozart guy” would instantly be labeled an unwashed boor, while no one making the same claim about Nash could be so readily described. This may be an unfair complaint, however; music is easier to make exciting than algorithms, but the filmmakers could have tried harder and given their audience a little more credit at appreciating math. It’s not without reason, after all, that a perfect proof is described as “elegant.”
In the movie’s defense one could argue that leaving out the math helps to make a more universal statement about schitzophrenia, and there lays the movie’s strength. Crowe’s performance, with all sorts of tics and mannerisms, may not be as subtle as his work in “The Insider,” (1999) but is still worthy of being called one of the year’s best, and Connelly holds her own next to him. One of the reasons we go to the movies—and look at books, poems, and paintings—is to see new things, or to see old things in a new light, and I left “A Beautiful Mind” with a better appreciation for the plight of the mentally ill. I only wish it could have cast that same light over the beauties of higher math.
Is “A Beautiful Mind” one of the year’s best movies? For subject matter and the performances of Crowe and Connelly, I’d say yes, barely, but as for the craft of the rest of the film, I would place it as an honorable mention alongside “The Score,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” or “A.I.”
Finished February 24, 2002.
Copyright 2002 Friday & Saturday Night