VERY SWEET, SMART, LOVING DETAILED FILM

Rating: Null/10 (27 December 2001)

True story of a Nobel Prize winner surviving with paranoid-schizophrenia. It's a good movie that will interest people who like movie's that talk about the mind, personality.. It also has some mystery, intrigue, and somewhat a love story. The characters are well developed at the beginning and that explains the 2:15 hrs. Watch out for the british accents at the beginning (too bad). I got what I wanted but this does not mean it was Star Wars. It's topics include the obvious and a bit about math, code breaking during the cold war, cruising for girls and how the theory of group partnering help in getting the girls as being a better strategy than being a loner cruiser (evolutionary theory of groups and group dynamics vs individualism), love, friendship, illusion, logic over illusion (mind over mind!!), perseverance, getting the audience into the man's mind (quite good), facing and talking the truth even though it ain't beautiful, sense-of-humor, and a lot of other good stuff which I won't discuss here. Understanding and support by loved ones, colleagues, friends, and coworkers. It's got a BIT of everything. I'm more impressed, than his Nobel prize, that's he's still alive at all !!
Don't worry too much about the math, and the code breaking (pattern recognition), allot is explained as it goes along.
Some little pointers for the beginning: he plays a game of some kind of checkers with school mates and they speak with a british accent; they reappear near the latter part of the film. Most of the math shown makes sense (for once) and is simply about mathematically representing groups of people by referencing to them using simple indexing numbers (i.e. 1 2 3 4 5 etc., and remember Venn diagrams with overlapping circles in high school), and also about reshaping space e.g. projecting the spherical earth onto a simple flat paper map.
I mostly liked the many small smart and beautiful little touches stories in the film. Also see his very revealing autobiography at the Nobel web site. The ending is a little quick and soapy but they got to please some of the chicks.