A BEAUTIFUL MIND

By Marc S. Sanders

The genius was always easier than living with the monsters in his mind.  So was the dilemma that consistently plagued Nobel Prize winning Professor John Nash.

Ahead of seeing A Beautiful Mind for the first time, what you don’t know about Professor Nash is what will dazzle you the most when Ron Howard uncovers the mysteries he lived with during graduate school and on through his fellowship at MIT and with his enduring and loving marriage to his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly in an Oscar winning role).  John Nash is masterfully portrayed by Russell Crowe in a celebrated, nominated performance.

Dr. Nash comes off like a genius savant when Howard’s film introduces him in 1947 at Princeton University.  The director adopts a technique of presenting much of Nash’s depths and highlighting patterns and numbers in magazines or on chalk boards or even within the reflections that appear before his eyes in bright sunlight.  On a clear night, see if you can find an umbrella within a starry sky. 

For many of us, I presume it’s hard to decipher what it means to live the life of a mathematical genius. Ron Howard with Akiva Goldsmith’s hailed adapted screenplay does not expect anyone to comprehend formulas or equations.  The filmmakers simply ask you to witness how discovery is processed.  Nash writes endlessly on his dorm room windows.  He fills up every inch of the chalk boards at his disposal.  He tears apart articles in magazines and wallpapers his room and office with them.  Even when he is not writing, he is computing how situations will end up best towards his and his peers’ advantage. There’s one curvaceous, blond woman standing in the center of a bar for one of the men to hopefully have a tryst with, but then who will be left to pair with the dark-haired ladies that surround her?  Nash finds the logic in all of the men abandoning the blond.  The genius realizes what none of us can see.  Go for what no one would ever expect to have occurred.

Despite the professor’s odd ticks, unwelcome vernacular and his lack of social skills, a well-established livelihood works out for him.  He falls in love with a former student that he marries, Alicia, and he obtains a fellowship for himself and two Princeton comrades to practice out their theories at MIT.  Personal companionship arrives with his former roommate, Charles (an energetic Paul Bettany), and his niece.  On the other hand, John has also been recruited to become a code decipherer for the government and he must answer to a mysterious gentleman named Parcher (Ed Harris) who is using John to stay a step ahead of the Soviets.   John’s work must remain top secret and as his clandestine activities become more threatening and intense, so does the paranoia get increasingly overwhelming.

I’ve only covered the first act of A Beautiful Mind because when the truth of John Nash’s purpose and how he is regarded is revealed, this biography becomes something much further from how it began.  Akiva Goldsmith’s trickery in his script is capable of surprising an audience when some veils are lifted for both the primary subject of this piece and those who come in and out of John Nash’s life.  This is a true story but it’s incredibly surprising that a mathematical wizard like John Nash could be living a whole other life that makes little sense at first.

Ron Howard is doing some fine work here reaching for material that might feel familiar with other cinematic geniuses in film ranging from the fictional Will Hunting to more recently real-life figures like Mark Zuckerberg. Characters like these stand out for their quirkiness and oddities.  With Russell Crowe’s brilliant characterization of awkwardness in his uneven walk and how he carries his papers and briefcase, it is not hard to adapt to the man on film.  What he says and how he speaks would leave any one of us to roll our eyes at his behavior.  You’d likely chortle at John just as his Princeton classmates do.  Later though, you understand how valuable his accomplishments are to a greater good, and at the same time you become alarmed at how Dr. Nash is being used both from his own perspective as well as by those figures who unexpectedly enter his life and will not just leave.

Jennifer Connelly’s role does not amount to much at first.  With her alluring looks that have graced other films in her earlier career, she initially comes off as a token spouse to the main character and you remind the person sitting next to you that is actress Jennifer Connelly who got her start in Labyrinth with David Bowie, and Once Upon A Time In America with Robert DeNiro.  Yet, as more dynamics are revealed about her husband does the character Alicia show through, and she has no choice but to survive with her spouse’s torment.  Connelly has a scene that will crush you when she must unleash her frustrations in the middle of the night as well as sporadically throughout the film. She has to be carefully observant of her husband’s behavior for the safety of their child and herself.  Ron Howard sets up scenes that haunt Alicia only, and his wide camera work is absolutely eye opening as it lends to her personal performance.

It’s fascinating to observe John Nash’s willpower as he persists to live with personal demons while upholding the demands of his genius.  This film works on so many levels of enhanced editing and perspective, but without unforgettable work from Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and a supporting cast of character actors like Christopher Plummer, Josh Charles, Judd Hirsh, Ed Harris and Paul Bettany it could not sustain its staying power. 

A Beautiful Mind is a thoroughly effective biography.