WhatzUp

A Beautiful Mind
by Derek Neff

Earlier this year, after director Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind had just been nominated for a slew of Academy Awards, there was a backlash against the movie that centered around how the filmmakers had whitewashed many of the facts about John Nash’s life. It turns out that in addition to being a brilliant physicist troubled by schizophrenia (which the movie does portray), Nash was also a bisexual, a racist and the father of a child born out of wedlock (none of which the movie even hints at). The argument doesn’t really hold water, though, because Nash the man is Nash the man, and Nash the movie character is another thing altogether. Bio-pics cannot by definition be an accurate and complete portrayal of an entire life, and we shouldn’t expect them to be. How would we sum up our own lives in two hours? (And we didn’t even win the Nobel prize.) The choice of the filmmakers to omit certain information about Nash is certainly as much a cynically commercial one as an artistic one; nevertheless, choices had to be made, and in light of what the movie sets out to accomplish, perhaps the choices they made were sound ones. The movie can only be judged on its own merits as a stand-alone work.

Covering a span of over 40 years, A Beautiful Mind opens as a youthful Nash begins his post-graduate work at Princeton, and closes as an aging Nash stands up to receive the Nobel Prize for his work in game theory, work that continues to be influential today. It’s everything in between these two events that’s so inherently fascinating.

Russell Crowe gives a tour de force performance as Nash. Never quite meeting the eyes of most people he talks to, and possessing an awkwardly stiff gait and a nervous-sounding Southern drawl, Nash is not what you would call a people person. He is, however, quite brilliant, and fearless in his desire to strike out in new territory. With the exception of his college roommate Charles (Paul Bettany) and the lovely Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), who eventually becomes his wife, Nash doesn’t have much to do with anyone else.

Soon after landing a job at MIT, Nash makes contact with a shadowy government agent who goes by the name of Parcher (Ed Harris). Parcher enlists Nash in an elaborate code-breaking project that Nash is not allowed to let anyone else in on. For the better part of an hour we are brought into Nash’s life in such a way that, when his wife and colleagues begin to question how in touch with reality Nash is, we are on Nash’s side, not theirs. We in effect share in Nash’s delusions, not aware they’re delusions at all. It’s a narrative trick very much in vogue right now — Fight Club, The Others, Vanilla Sky and The Sixth Sense all employed the same trick — and I think it’s getting a little tired. I found the movie much more engaging once it comes to light that not only Parcher, but a couple of other people in Nash’s life as well, are figments of his imagination, and have been since day one.

I don’t know very much about the workings of the schizophrenic mind, but I can say that A Beautiful Mind seems to do a good job of showing how excruciatingly difficult to would be, not only to suffer from this disease, but to love someone who suffers from it as well. It’s at this stage in the movie that Connelly really shines in her role as Alicia. You would not blame her for leaving John in an institution and getting on with her life, but you admire her for staying. (In real life, the two eventually divorced, but we’re talking about the movie here, remember.)

Presumably, there isn’t a story to tell unless Nash goes on to win the Nobel Prize. But the Nobel, like any prize, is as much about the politics and posturing leading up to it as anything else. (Nash won the prize for something he had done decades earlier, and the prize was for Economics, not the Physics prize Nash aspired to.) But his receiving the prize gives Nash’s story the kind of arc that Hollywood loves. He might just as well have not won it — many great scientists and writers never did — and his story would have been just as compelling. But would Hollywood have made a movie of it?

A Beautiful Mind went on to win several Oscars, including Best Picture. The general consensus in Hollywood seems to be that Crowe is the greatest actor of his generation and that Ron Howard, in addition to being the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, is the best director the world has ever known. (Crowe is great, as are many others working in movies today, and Howard is very good, though I like his little-seen movie The Paper much better.) But A Beautiful Mind is not a great movie any more than it’s the definitive life story of John Nash. Once the hype settles down, A Beautiful Mind, like countless Oscar-winners before it, will take its place in movie history, quietly settling for what it is: a fairly good movie about a very interesting man.