A Beautiful Mind is a touching, emotionally charged film
detailing the life of a brilliant academic who suffers from
schizophrenia. This affliction slowly takes over his mind
and we watch as his life crumbles apart around him. He
abandons his students, alienates his colleagues and
replaces his research with a fruitless and all-consuming
obsession. Eventually he is taken into hospital where he
is forced, with the help of electric-shock therapy and regular
medication, to accept his condition and attempt to repair
the shattered fragments of his life.
He succeeds. Of course he succeeds, this is Hollywood
and Hollywood likes a happy ending. In this case the
happy ending is that, as an old man and after years of
struggle, the poor academic is awarded the Nobel Prize.
One interesting point though; it's a true story and our hero
is none other than John Forbes Nash Jr.
As a young man, John Nash was a mathematical genius.
In 1947 he went to Princeton on a Carnegie Scholarship,
and after three years had produced a 27-page dissertation
for his doctorate in which he greatly expanded the field of
Game Theory, transporting it from a position of relative
obscurity into one of almost universal relevance.
In the 1920s the father of Game Theory, Hungarian mathematician
John von Neumann, had shown that mathematical models
could be used to explain the behaviour of players in simple
games. His work was limited in scope however, and although
interesting, it appeared to be of little practical use.
Nash's dissertation expanded on von Neumann's work,
showing how Game Theory could explain complex as well as
simple competitive behavior. It wasn't a comprehensive
solution to all game situations, but it did lay the foundations
for the huge body of work on Game Theory which has been
produced since.
Unfortunately, very little of this comes across in
A Beautiful Mind
because Ron Howard, the director, seems more interested in
making a film about a schizophrenic than a mathematician
suffering from schizophrenia. At the start of the film we are shown
a Hollywood template of a typically obsessive young academic,
introverted, socially inept, dismissive of his colleagues' work. If
the notes we see Nash scribbling on his windows were chemical
formulae or rhyming couplets rather than mathematical equations,
the character would have seemed equally plausible.
This is not to say that Russell Crowe, who plays Nash, does a
bad job. Indeed, he succeeds in giving his character a convincing
plausibility rarely seen in mainstream cinema these days, and he
was certainly a deserving Oscar nominee. It's just that we never see
him doing any maths apart from the occasional scribbling on
windows.
And when his great breakthrough finally comes, Nash is not
poring over his books in the library or gazing fixedly at his
glass equivalent of a blackboard, he's in a bar, eyeing up a
group of attractive young women. How visually convenient.
But to be fair, this is a dramatization based on Sylvia Nasar's
best-selling book, not a documentary. Its aim is to entertain, not
to enlighten, and it does this perfectly well. Russell Crowe
produces probably his best performance to date and is
equally convincing as both the awkward young genius and
the tortured
convalescent, struggling to rebuild his marriage and
career. Jennifer Connolly (who won the Oscar for Best Supporting
Actress) is excellent
as Alicia, Nash's long-suffering wife, and there are several
strong performances from the supporting cast, most notably
Ed Harris as a mysterious character from the military and Paul Bettany
as Nash's Princeton roommate.
But Hollywood requires more from its films than a few good
performances; it requires drama, action, romance, pathos, excitement.
A Beautiful Mind makes a fair attempt to include all of these
ingredients and the results obviously satisfied producers and film-goers
alike - it won Oscars for Best Film and Best Director.
But for those expecting to see a film about mathematics it
is unlikely to satisfy. Early in the film, John Nash describes himself
as having "two helpings of brain and half a helping of heart". A
Beautiful Mind seems the exact opposite.
