Film review: A Beautiful Mind (12) (From Stroud News and Journal)

Film review: A Beautiful Mind (12)

IT IS always inspiring when you hear of someone triumphing over adversity and never more so than in the case of the Nobel Prize winner Professor John Forbes Nash, Jr. Often compared to Newton, Mendel and Darwin, Nash is a mathematical genius who nonetheless struggled for 30 years with schizophrenia.

This film covers 47 years of his troubled life from his college days when his mental illness took hold, until his eventual break through to rationality.

It is important to remember that Nash's success in overcoming schizophrenia is exceptionally rare. In Sylvia Nasar's 1998 biography of Nash she uses a very apt quote from Wordsworth about a man forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone, which expresses the isolation surrounding all sufferers succinctly.

By the time Nash was in his early 30s this extraordinarily gifted man had done brilliant work in quantum mechanics, number theory and in particular game theory - the mathematics of competition which contradicts the doctrines of the economist Adam Smith. He received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, along with John C Harsanyi and Richard Selten, for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games. In my opinion you would need to be a genius to understand that alone.

It is 1947 and Nash (Russell Crowe) arrives at Princeton University along with a group of clever young mathematicians. He stands out because he is tactless and awkward. When he is challenged to a game of Go - a complicated 3000-year-old board game - he loses gracelessly explaining: "I had the first move. My play was perfect. The game is flawed."

This does not endear him to his peers, but he is not worried. " I don't much like people and they don't much like me," he says. Besides, he has his roommate Charles (Paul Bettany) to buck him up whenever he is low and he adores Charless orphaned 8-year-old niece Marcee (Vivien Cardone).

Considering Nash has his own agenda and never turns up to class, it's a tribute to his aptitude that he wins a coveted research and teaching post at MIT.

One of his students is lovely physics scholar Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly). Fortunately she is very broad-minded for the 1950s and falls for his beautiful mind as he is extremely blunt in his courtship and has absolutely no concept of charm. They marry and Alicia falls pregnant around the time Nash starts to show his first signs of serious mental problems. That is vastly simplifying this very interesting and engaging film, as we travel though top-secret undercover work with coded messages on the front page of the New York Times, a dangerous shootout and shock therapy that sets one's teeth on edge.

It is great that director Ron Howard and Crowe are up for Oscar nominations as this is a stylish production. However it is Crowe who should get the big one if there is any justice. It's not that he didn't deserve an Oscar for Gladiator (2000) but he gave a vastly superior performance in The Insider (1999) when he lost out to Kevin Spacey for American Beauty (1999). Like Dustin Hoffman (Rain man) and Geoffrey Rush (Shine) before him he is mesmerising and utterly convincing as a disturbed genius who can still attract a gorgeous lady.

There is one moment at the end when a man approaches Nash and asks him a question. Before answering, he turns to a student and asks if she sees the man too, because he is still not sure which people really exist.

This scene evoked from me a heart felt tear, compassion and a giggle simultaneously. Unfortunately Crowe is not Hollywood's golden boy (Tom Hanks), so whether he will be allowed to repeat his Oscar success is doubtful, but I am gunning for him - at least we British have acknowledged his performance with a Best Actor Bafta Award this week.

Equally good were the rest of the cast. Connelly in particular rises to the constant changes her character requires, as this story is as much about her relationship with Nash as anything else. She is his strength. He recalls his first grade teacher saying he was born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart - not exactly marriageable material, but he has her total devotion.

My only gripe about this awe-inspiring story is that it has more than a touch of Nash's vivid imagination about it and very little to do with reality. The truth is before he married he had already fathered a baby by Eleanor Stiers and left them both on the breadline. He had homosexual tendencies - once he was even arrested for soliciting - and to cap it all Alicia divorced him. To be fair they remarried last June, but I don't for one minute think the real John Forbes Nash, Jr is quite as he has been presented here.

However this is just a film and a jolly good one at that.

Clare Shepherd 9/10