A Beautiful Mind: Inside the twilight world of a tortured mind of genius

Well folks… believe it or not, this will be my very first attempt to review a movie still in the theaters. Every one of my reviews prior to this has been based upon a film now on DVD or videocassette.

Last week, my wife, our son, and I made an unusual evening foray to Brunswick, Maine, the town nearest our home having a theater in it. The theater is one of those Hoyts multiplexes (yes, Maine does have ‘em!!) with 14 theaters in the same building. After driving the 32 miles to Brunswick, we found ourselves faced with a veritable embarrassment of excellent choices… among them Black Hawk Down, John Q, A Beautiful Mind, Big Fat Liar, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, and Mulholland Drive.

We opted for A Beautiful Mind, for the most part because it seemed like it stood the best chance of being the most interesting to the three of us, and because we’ve always enjoyed movies directed by Ron Howard.

SYNOPSIS

To put it succinctly, A Beautiful Mind is a beautiful movie… perhaps one of the finest we’ve seen at a theater in quite some time! Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, and Christopher Plummer, this movie held all of us spellbound for its entire two-plus hour running time. A Beautiful Mind features a superb cast, an outstanding story line (based on actual persons and events) and a wonderful script.

A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Forbes Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose work on Game Theory ultimately won for him the Nobel Prize in Economics, but whose "beautiful mind…" brilliant as it was… was tortured by the most debilitating form mental illness imaginable: paranoid schizophrenia.

Our story opens at Princeton University in 1948. John Nash is then a young doctoral candidate with a reputation for intellectual genius and unconventional behavior. He’s widely ridiculed for his lack of social skills. As a scholar, he eschews traditional forms of study in favor of looking for that "completely original idea." It seems that, in short order, John Nash has proven himself a failure on both the social and academic fronts.

Almost by accident (at least in the movie, anyway...), Nash formulates a theory that would become the basis of most economic decision-making in the last one-third of the twentieth century and beyond: the Nash Equilibrium to Game Theory. His work is almost instantly recognized by his professors as ground-breaking; it will ultimately make him a Nobel Laureate.

After receiving his doctorate, Nash marries Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), a fellow student and another gifted mathematician. Nash is quickly hired by a corporation that is a major defense contractor. He maintains his ties to Princeton as an instructor, but he also begins working in the shadowy world of Cold War cryptography and code-breaking. He’s recruited into this work by a mysterious man named William Parcher (Ed Harris).

At about this time, Nash begins displaying erratic behavior that causes concern for Alicia and those few of his colleagues who like and respect him. He ends up being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and undergoes months of severe and painful treatment for the disease.

The balance of A Beautiful Mind tells of Nash’s long road to recovery from his mental illness, aided by his always loyal but long-suffering wife and his friends. The film ends (this is not a spoiler, folks, just a well-known fact) with Nash receiving the long-overdue recognition for his seminal work on Game Theory: the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics.

EVALUATION

As the final credits of A Beautiful Mind rolled, my wife, our son, and I sat in the theater, all of us absolutely stunned by what we had just seen. We were in complete agreement: this gorgeous film was one of the best we’d seen in years.

Words can’t adequately describe Russell Crowe’s magnificent performance as the tortured genius John Nash. His acting range is simply incredible!! From quiet, nervous, socially inept scholar, to intense code-breaker, to delusional mental patient, Crowe keeps viewers constantly on the edge of their seats with his completely believable interpretation of the mind of a schizophrenic. It is, in my view, Crowe’s best performance ever… and there have been a lot of good ones!

Jennifer Connelly is excellent as Alicia Nash. Appearing next to Crowe must have been rather daunting for her. She not only held her own next to the man who is rapidly becoming one of Hollywood’s truly great actors; she illuminated her scenes with her own considerable talent. In Connelly’s capable hands, her character shows tenderness, compassion, and a strength of character that must have been the hallmark of the person she so capably portrays.

Ed Harris brings his usual superlative skills as a character actor to the role of the shadowy William Parcher, the man who recruits Nash into the world of Cold War code-breaking.

After the acting, the most impressive feature of A Beautiful Mind is the technique director Ron Howard uses to portray the phantasmic state of John Nash’s mind. I don’t want to offer too many details here, for to do so would be to provide a major "spoiler" for those who haven’t seen the movie yet. Suffice it to say, the technique is surprising and very effective. Viewers may occasionally feel themselves a bit unsure of where the story is going (as I did), but rest assured… all will be made clear by the end of the film. ‘Nuff said.

Before we watched A Beautiful Mind, I had seen a television interview with director Ron Howard in which he talked about the making of the film. In this interview, Howard stated that he had decided, as much as possible, to shoot in chronological order… in other words, the earliest scenes were shot first, the latest scenes last. According to Howard, this is a technique hardly ever used by directors; he attributes much of the movie’s best qualities to shooting in sequential order.

I tend to agree with Howard’s assessment of his own work. The movie has a decidedly ensemble-like feel to it despite a relatively large cast. Everyone, and I mean everone, is so good in their part, and every scene flows so seamlessly into the one that follows that it seemed to us, throughout the film’s two-plus hour running time, like we were witnesses to an actual unfolding drama. I seriously doubt that A Beautiful Mind would have been as intensely dramatic or as effective a vehicle for such a highly complex, intelligently told story.

I've heard it argued that A Beautiful Mind isn't a particularly good film because it leaves out a lot of important facts about the life of John Nash. A fair argument, I suppose, but one I don't quite agree with. Considering the economic and demographic realities of film-making (chief among them the facts that audiences prefer films of about two hours in length, and don't particularly like overly complex story lines), I think Ron Howard and Akiva Goldman did a marvelous job of presenting a highly complex story, one that contains a lot of potential pitfalls, in an intelligent, informative, and reasonably easy to comprehend manner.

The fact that A Beautiful Mind doesn't include information about John Nash fathering a child out of wedlock, or seeking refuge outside the United States, or being perhaps a racist, or bisexual, takes nothing away from the film's central premise. Had this information been included, it probably would have only served to unnecessarily lengthen the film and obfuscate its message.

Ron Howard and his crew were faced with the daunting task of presenting the life of an obscure man of genius, one suffering from a terribly debilitating mental disorder, in a manner that allows audiences to understand and feel empathy toward its subject. In the end, Howard, Goldman, Crowe, Connelly, and company struck a pretty good balance.

Having said all that, I don't think A Beautiful Mind is a perfect movie. Some things definitely could have been done better. But, on balance, this is a superb film that tells a powerful story with compassion toward its subject and addresses the issue of mental illness with sensitivity.

OUR VERDICT: If you haven’t guessed by now, my wife, our son, and I are unanimous in our verdict on A Beautiful Mind: run, don’t walk to the nearest theater and see this film. If you’ve seen it already, watch it again!! A Beautiful Mind is richly deserving of its plethora of Academy Award nominations. I certainly hope that on March 24, 2002 it wins every one of ‘em!!