Triumph of the Spirit

Rating: 7/10 (22 September 2005)

Director Ron Howard has the reputation of making intellectually undemanding films, often with a sentimental, uplifting theme, and "A Beautiful Mind" is no exception. It is a biography of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, but makes no attempt to explain Nash's mathematical theories, probably wisely as pure mathematics is a notoriously difficult subject for the layman to grasp. The film points out that these theories have influenced a number of fields of activity, including economics and evolutionary biology, but does not go into any detail about the nature of that influence. The film is rather an example of the "triumph of the human spirit over adversity" type of biopic, the adversity over which Nash triumphs being the schizophrenia from which he suffered.
When we first meet Nash he is an undergraduate at Princeton in the late 1940s, intellectually brilliant but awkward and lacking in social skills. Despite his gaucheness, however, Nash makes a close friend in his more self-assured room-mate Charles Herman, and later meets and marries a beautiful student named Alicia. After graduating, he is recruited by the American intelligence services to help break Soviet codes during the Cold War. His CIA contact, Parcher, informs him that the Soviets are using American newspapers and magazines to convey information to their agents, and much of Nash's time is taken up with his attempts to crack the code they are using.
It is at this point that Howard pulls off a coup de cinema. Sudden plot twists are more normally associated with the thriller genre, but Howard shows that they can be just as effective in the context of a biopic. We learn that Nash is not merely eccentric but actually mentally ill and that much of what we have hitherto seen- and accepted as fact- is not the truth, but an illusion existing only inside Nash's head. It turns out that there is no such person as Charles Herman; he is a figment of Nash's imagination. Although it appears that Nash did indeed do some work for the CIA, Parcher is also an imaginary figure and the supposed Soviet newspaper code which Nash has desperately been trying to crack has no existence in reality. There is a suggestion that Nash's fantasies are ways of compensating for his own perceived deficiencies; "Charles" is outgoing and confident whereas Nash himself is shy and reserved, and the melodramatic adventures in which he becomes embroiled with "Parcher" perhaps reflect an unfulfilled desire for physical excitement. The rest of the film details Nash's attempts, with the aid of his doctors and the loyal Alicia, to overcome his illness and to return to productive life as a mathematician.
Like a number of Howard's films, this one has been criticised for its alleged sentimentality. This criticism, however, does not seem to have done it any harm in the eyes of the Academy; indeed, sentimentality often seems to be a positive advantage when it comes to winning Academy Awards. There is some truth in the criticism, but at least "A Beautiful Mind" sins less grievously in this respect than does another recent "Best Picture" winner, "Million Dollar Baby". Like that film, however, it is saved by some excellent acting performances. I knew from "Gladiator" and "Master and Commander" that Russell Crowe was a gifted actor; "A Beautiful Mind" showed me that he is also a versatile one, able to play a character very different from the action heroes he played in those two films and to convey the pathos of Nash's situation as the possessor of a brilliant but flawed mind. He received good support from Jennifer Connelly as Alicia and also from Ed Harris as Parcher and Paul Bettany as Charles, these latter two actors coping well with the difficult task of portraying characters who are, even in the context of the story itself, fictitious, having no reality outside the mind of another character.
It has also been claimed that the film is not always accurate when it comes to the facts of Nash's life. It has, for example, been criticised for not mentioning allegations of affairs with both men and women, although I am not sure whether details of his supposed bisexuality were omitted at the behest of studio executives who felt that a main character who was anything other than a red-blooded heterosexual was bad for the box-office, or of gay activists who disliked any possible association between homosexuality and mental illness, or of Nash himself who has denied the allegations. It has also been pointed out that Nash's real-life relationship with Alicia was rather more rocky than the one shown here; they were actually divorced and remarried, something omitted from the film. No biography, however, can ever hope to tell the full story of its subject's life, and biographers always have to choose which elements they wish to emphasise. This choice is particularly acute for the scriptwriters and directors of filmed biographies, if only because a normal-length feature film can convey far less information than a book. Here Howard and Akiva Goldsman have clearly gone for the emotional rather than the factual approach to Nash's life; seen as entertainment rather than a biographical treatise this approach works well enough. 7/10