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 fruitleand 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 si-mp-le 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 si-mp-le competitive behaviour.
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 acroin A Beautiful Mind
because the director (Ron Howard) seems more interested in ma-ki-ng 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 glaequivalent 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 dramatisation 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,