A Beautiful Mind

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Rating: A-

Interesting biopic gives a superficial treatment to its subjects.

A Beautiful Mind recounts the tale of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a brilliant but eccentric mathematician who handed in a 27-page doctoral thesis in 1949 based on what he termed his "theory of non-cooperative games." Slow to gain acceptance, it gradually came to revolutionize the theory of economics, until forty-five years later it garnered him a Nobel Prize. However, there were a few bumps in the road along the way. This movie is basically a chronicle of the bumps.

The film begins as Nash (Russell Crowe) arrives at Princeton University to pursue his doctorate in mathematics. He talks like Forrest Gump, and generally comports himself like a moron, so we know right off the bat he's supposed to be a genius. Among his other admirable traits, he "doesn't care much for people," and he can conceive a mathematical definition to describe how bad another student's tie is.

Eventually, his knack for mathematics lands him a teaching position at MIT. His first day of class he tosses the textbook in the trash and proclaims the course will be a waste of time for both him and the students (talk about academic honesty). Here he meets student Jennifer Connelly, who eventually becomes his wife. Just between you and me, what do you figure the chances are that an MIT egghead would look like Jennifer Connelly?

I enjoyed A Beautiful Mind, but at the same time I wish it delved a little deeper into Nash's theories and his accomplishments. His theory of non-cooperative games is explained briefly using a scenario where Nash and several friends discuss their strategy to approach a group of women in a bar. The scene is a good start, but I would've welcomed further explanation at other points in the film. It's as if director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman were either afraid of boring the audience with the details, or lacked the understanding necessary to express the theory in layman's terms. As a result, we get the feeling Howard and company are saying, "Just accept, for the purposes of our story, that John Nash was a brilliant man. What he actually accomplished is an unimportant detail." This seems a bit of an injustice to his work, and condescending to the audience.

Crowe and Connelly carry the weight of the film on their shoulders. Crowe is certainly given more to do here than in Gladiator, and Connelly has matured as an actress since her days in Waking the Dead. When Nash receives the Nobel Prize at the movie's end, the film portrays it as a triumphant emergence from the many years of personal and marital problems he experienced after his days at Princeton. The problem I had with this is that the awarding of the Nobel Prize was an external event which he had no control over, based on work he'd done decades earlier. Suppose the prize had gone to someone else (technically, Nash was named as a co-recipient) - would that mean he should be branded a loser? Or suppose his theory had been accepted much sooner, and he received the award before all his troubles began. The construction of the story is artificial in this regard, since what is portrayed as evidence of a triumphant turnaround in his life actually is unrelated to it at all.

You may have heard some controversy brewing over the liberties Howard and Goldsman took with the facts. The film's publicity campaign states it was "inspired by true events in the life of John Forbes Nash," which sneakily sidesteps the claim that it's a true story. Russell Crowe was reportedly critical of the changes made from the source material, Sylvia Nasar's book of the same name. My personal opinion is that the distortions here are nowhere near as objectionable as those in, say, The Hurricane. If anything, they're more likely to make you wonder, "How could this be true?" than to gravely mislead you about the facts of the story. If you're interested, the major alterations are briefly summarized in the link below.

WARNING: Don't click this link unless you've already seen the movie. There are some big-time spoilers.