A mind is a terrible thing to lose.
That is true whether you are a hod carrier or a mathematician, but the reality of the society is that it will mourn the loss of the mathematician's mind more piercingly than the hod carrier's. And it will celebrate the recovery of that mind more vividly as well, which is essentially what Ron Howard's stunning "A Beautiful Mind" is about.
John Nash was one of those men both blessed and cursed by genius. It made him smart, it made him fragile. At Princeton, just after World War II, he was the fellow all the other math students loved to hate because he couldn't be bothered with class and spent most of his time in his rooms drawing formulas on the windows with soap while treating fellow humans like shrubbery, when he noticed them at all.
Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly in "A Beautiful Mind."
(Universal Pictures)
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This much is certain: He was a genius. At the end of his year of soap and windows, he emerged with a thesis so original and profound that I could be twice as smart and still not get it. I think it has to do with something called game theory. But if you don't take it from me, take it from the Nobel Prize committee, it was a peach of a thing. He was promoted from boy wonder to star in several days, great work if you can get it, and quickly swallowed up by the MIT genius machine, where he taught and diddled with more soap on windows.
This is also certain: Russell Crowe is fabulous. His Nash is quite a concoction: a mixture of arrogance and fear, all locked in a giant, clumsy body, with a wit that was deadly when it could be provoked into paying attention. But Nash also had, and Crowe also expresses, great ambition. He knew he could make a difference in the way humans understand the universe, and only achievement at the Newtonian level was acceptable to him. People hated him, but they also secretly loved him, because he had so little need of them.
(The movie, as has been pointed out recently, does ignore Nash's occasional episodes of homosexuality, presumably in the interests of avoiding the commercially limiting label of "gay picture." Make of this what you will.)
Howard, generally as banal a filmmaker as there is, manages to bring some unusual virtues to this project. For one thing, he is very good at getting the hothouse atmosphere of pre-PC academia, where the stakes feel very high and the hunger for success, fame and power is almost witheringly intense. What we see is very smart young guys jockeying to be No. 1, and annoyed as hell that the lumbering West Virginian is just naturally the best.
The director is also good at evoking the beauty of Nash's mind. It somehow saw patterns in things that seemed to defy patterns, like the ramblings of pigeons in a park. It's as if he alone were able not merely to see the universe, but somehow see into it, examine its blueprints, track its gears and decipher its codes, all in mathematical terms.
Of course such genius didn't go unnoticed; that much brainpower had military applications, and it wasn't long before the Defense Department and the FBI were helping themselves to his ample heap of IQ points. But possibly it's there that the trouble starts, for the pressure of the work becomes excruciating, particularly as the screws are tightened by a supervising federal agent played by Ed Harris, with that looming Harris presence. The only escape from this pressure is provided by Jennifer Connelly as the student who falls in love with and marries the tortured genius.
Do you notice this review becoming somewhat vague? I mean even vaguer than usual. That is because – I even hesitate to tell you this much – "A Beautiful Mind" is in some sense a work of gimmickry whose intricacies should not be revealed. In fact, it's not a movie with a gimmick in it, it's a gimmick with a movie around it. It makes you understand what it feels like to have a serious breakdown in powerful, empathetic ways that no movie has ever done before. And it makes you understand the effort of will to defeat such a debilitating experience, not by drugs or therapy, but as Nash does, by sheer willpower. Figuring out the secret principles of the world was easy compared with shutting up the voices that whispered into his ear for decades, and the figures that danced in his broken mind.
"A Beautiful Mind" is a greatly ambitious undertaking, but from the commercial point of view quite insane. The movie is ridiculously fragile: It's like a Faberge egg, and even a twitch of foreknowledge will destroy the magic of the movie utterly. That is why I will say no more. Anything else, and we're beyond journalism and into desecration.
A BEAUTIFUL MIND (PG-13, 135 minutes) – contains some intense scenes. At area theaters.
