A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: A Beautiful Mind

Date Viewed: 12/27/01

Details:

Russell Crowe

Jennifer Connelly

Ed Harris

Paul Bettany

Judd Hirsch

Christopher Plummer

Director: Ron Howard

Music: James Horner

Score: ++

The Review: Excellent! This moody and ultimately uplifting film is the biography of mathematician John Nash (Crowe). Stated so baldly, without any foreknowledge or context, it would seem an odd topic for film treatment, but it is utterly fascinating and engrossing. The film follows Nash's life from graduate school experiences at Princeton immediately post-WWII, through his working inside the code-breaking Cold War machine, well into the mid-1990's. This span of time includes strokes of original genius, a real love story, the depths of paranoid schizophrenia, and the awarding of the Nobel Prize. It captures well the dark and manic mood of the McCarthy and Cold War eras of the '50's and '60's. It has been simplified substantially from the award-winning biography of the same title by Sylvia Nasar (1998, ISBN 0743224574). (If you are interested in Nash's autobiography from the Nobel site, try here.)

The acting is wonderful, powerful, compelling. One of the outstanding aspects of this film is the point of view presented to the audience: it is from within Nash's mind, and the disturbing nature of this viewpoint only becomes frighteningly clear in the last third of the film. Another outstanding effect is to place the viewer inside the working, creative and patterning mind, and to give a chill of recognition of the feeling that "sometimes you just know something."

The definition for human that I've preferred for a long time is "a pattern-seeking creature" -- not merely recognizing, but actively seeking. However, the problem with pattern-seeking in the extreme is that, on one hand, with a minimum of evidence and self-criticism, patterns can impose themselves where they truly do not exist, and it can lead to patent nonsense (e.g., Bible codes, Atlantean blueprints, and other such blather); on the other hand, even while supporting a stunning intellect, pattern-seeking can lead to compulsive pathology. This film eloquently explores the consequences of the latter path, while outlining the narrow boundary between the two misused words 'genius' and 'madness.' The creative human mind is quite a fragile thing, a concept explored by Nasar as well as by other recent authors such as Pickover (Strange Brains and Genius, 1999; ISBN 0688168949), Rothenberg (Creativity and Madness, 1994; ISBN 0801849772) and Nettle (Strong Imagination, 2001; ISBN 0198507062).

The images are accompanied by complementary music by Horner. I generally like his orchestrations, and this is one of the first movies he's scored in a long time that is not dire tragedy with most of the main characters dying.

Highly recommended.

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