#10: A Beautiful Mind (2001)

TLFC member Paul, offers us his first choice:

‘Into the Eye Of The Beholder’

A Beautiful Mind
Directed by Ron Howard
Dreamworks 2002

You can say what you like about the kiwi bad boy, but you can’t deny Russell Crowe can act. My first sight of him was in LA Confidential, where he stood out even amongst a host of other excellent performances, but he really took the movie world by storm in Ridley Scott’s epic Gladiator. However, impressive though Crowe was in the role of Maximus, I was bewildered at the time that he received the Academy’s laurels for what really only amounted to a formidable display of testosterone. (What actually struck me most about Gladiator was the scene in which Oliver Reed passes the gladiatorial baton to Crowe, both in the film’s narrative and metaphorically in life as Hollywood’s anti-hero. “Remember, Maximus,” Reed’s character says, “we succeed because the audience loves us!”)

Despite being the bookie’s favourite for Best Actor in 2002, the award that Crowe truly deserved for his starring role in A Beautiful Mind eluded him at the last minute, looking suspiciously like a righteous slap on the wrist for a bit of indecorous behaviour at another awards ceremony .  Which is unfortunate, because in A Beautiful Mind, Crowe gives a consummate piece of acting in an extremely demanding role.  It is an account of the life of John Nash, a mathematical genius who endured many years of personal trauma before winning the Nobel Prize for mathematics in 1994. The film examines his difficult early days at Princeton University, through his groundbreaking work on ‘game theory’ (the statistical analysis of human interaction) and subsequent experiences culminating in a devastating breakdown and diagnosis with schizophrenia.

As with any biopic, Ron Howard has, of necessity, omitted aspects of Nash and abridged parts of his life he felt insignificant to the main thrust of the plot but Nash’s authorised biographer, Sylvia Nasar, believes that “the film’s depiction of [Nash’s] disease and re-emergence is substantially true.” And a depiction of schizophrenia that was essentially true to the experience of many people with the condition was presumably what Howard set out to produce.  And to someone like me, who had never taken time to understand schizophrenia, he has deftly crafted a story that manages to convey to the broadest audience the full horror of Nash’s experiences. The film is genuinely harrowing in parts and contains understated profundity in others. There’s a scene where Nash, apparently recovering but deprived of his work and virtually housebound asks his wife Alicia, “What do people do?” Crowe’s depiction of vulnerability in the face of existential angst is heart rending. Devoted but weary, Alicia’s response is an elegant piece of philosophy: “Activity is available. Just add meaning.”

Another habit of biopics is that of lionising their subject without telling us anything new. A Beautiful Mind is an altogether different quantity. For those of us who do not share John Nash’s schizophrenia, it takes us into an alien landscape and shows us: this is what it can be like to be human.