Nash Disequilibrium...

Rating: 6/10 (5 June 2017)

"A Beautiful Mind" presents all the characteristics of a great film but since it deals with schizophrenia and visual and aural elements that aren't what they seem to be, I wondered sometimes if what I was seeing wasn't just elements of episodic greatness wrapped up in a story that actually had less substantial things to say than what the raving critics pretend it said. Ron Howard used to make movies that worked both on and beneath the surface, but this is a case where many elements of one man's life overlap and generate more confusion than fascination. That it won the Oscar for Best Picture has the same puzzling effect than of a math riddle.
The film is a legitimate biopic about one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century. I'm not sure I would call it 'beautiful', even Einstein didn't get that title, but 'fascinating', it sure was. It belongs to John Forbes Nash, the mathematician and economist who paved the way for a new conception of governing dynamics and competition, less through the theory of games than the notion of equilibrium, the fact that the lesser of two evils is a wiser option than 'everyone for himself'. I'm not being persnickety but I wish the film dedicated more time to his revolutionary work, I studied economics and the 'Nash equilibrium' was one of these lessons that instantly inspired me and I could see countless situations where the genius of Nash was applied.
Maybe being a math buff influenced my expectations and I'm perfectly aware that this is only a cinematic adaptation, that Ron Howard or Akiva Goldman (the writer) are entitled to their narrative choices, but I was disappointed to see the 'sick' side of Nash' personality being shamelessly unleashed especially after the superficial treatment his game theory got, though I loved its application on the way to approach women. The second act of the film primarily deals with the diseases that struck that 'beautiful' mind but could have been a more subtle treatment of his mental condition, not just a translation into archetypal cinematic language but something in par with the subtle and realistic way Nash was played in the first act as a graduate student from Princeton whose sociability isn't exactly his strongest suit and his interactions with his co-workers or with women work as efficient comical moments.
Indeed, to a fellow recipient of a prestigious Mathematics scholarship (Josh Lucas), Nash slyly declares that he found nothing seminal in any of the articles he wrote, and to a woman, well, let's just that a reference to sexual fluids earned him a nice slap in the face. Russell Crowe is quite convincing as Nash, a guy never looking his straight in the eyes, often down, looking for patterns in everything, and looking forward to having his scientific epiphany. There's a moment where he just lost a Go game and is puzzled because he played the part perfectly, this display of bad loser's spirit would have been more efficient had it not been immediately followed by another one where he throws his office desk from the window, encouraged by his roommate, an imaginary 'literature' student played by Paul Bettany and it seems like the writer was already preparing us for weirdness. This is a film that would have benefited from less spectacular stunts, no matter how supposedly true to Nash' life they were.
So, once the article about governing dynamics is published and made a name out of Nash, the film makes a chronological leap where we find him as an MIT teacher. He there meets Alicia, a beautiful student, played by Jennifer Connelly, and if not original, the chemistry is believable. This is where something derails the narrative again, once you get the point that mathematics won't play a part to the story, you accept to get to the intimate life, but then for some reason, the writer decides it's time for us to get to the piece of resistance. Then the film focuses on subplots involving a mysterious agent from Ministry of Defense (Ed Harris) assigning Nash to thwart a Russian plot by finding patterns in newspapers. Then the film turns into some sort of copycat-political thriller with chase sequences and shootouts, that aren't even supposed to be real.
The treatment of schizophrenia is so visible, logic and structured that the whole thing loses its credibility, it's on the same level as 'Inception' or the Matrix while I wish it was a bit more like 'Pi', or something that could really be perceived as mental internal, it is a biopic after all. Not that the film is always about Nash's hallucinations but even the rest is an uneven experience, it starts with elements of abstraction that makes you penetrate in the world of Nash, his fascination for patterns, in the sky, but then we're plunged in a succession of archetypal situations that occupy so much of the story every other character becomes just an observer of Nash' deterioration, even Alicia becomes the obligatory long suffering wife without any subtlety. How about having the insight of the one sane person who was the closest to Nash, his wife?
Her performance was good enough to earn her an Oscar but it's not the same complexity as in her "Requiem for a Dream". As for Nash, we don't see the math genius but the victim of a severe mental condition, but it's handled in such a way it's difficult to care about it. The film is well acted, well directed, but I'm not sure it does justice to the legacy of a man reduced for almost half the film to things that didn't even happen. As spectacular as they were, I don't think they belonged to the film, and maybe, quoting Nash who commented on a bad tie, and after having 'enjoyed' other Goldman's screenplays, there might be a pattern explaining how bad his narrative choices are.