Ron Howard finally makes it

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2002)

Some spoilers follow.
To judge from his previous films, Ron Howard doesn't like smart people much, doesn't trust intelligence as a trait and thinks little of thinking as an activity. How did he come to present a sympathetic account of the career of a genius? However he did it, he did it; and for the first time in his career he's made a genuinely good film.
On the surface this is ideal material for the old Ron Howard, the director of "Parenthood" and "Apollo 13" and "EdTV" who longs for opportunities to sink the boot into intellectuals and urge his audience to be at least moderately stupid. Nash is mentally brilliant, yes, but that (according to a superficial analysis of what happens) is his very undoing: he suffers from schizophrenia, and is prone to both paranoid fantasies and vivid hallucinations. That's what comes of having a beautiful mind. Far better to have a dull, unattractive one. ...Only that's not what the film is saying. Nash finds away around his difficulties not because he agrees to be stupid, but because he's able to remain clever; he works out (by thinking about it) that certain of the people he sees do not in fact exist, and thinks of effective ways of ignoring them. And anyway, ARE the hallucinations and the paranoia merely manifestations of the very same mental states that allow Nash to have his mathematical insights? Not at all. Some of the other mathematicians we see are, say, half as clever as Nash, but they're not half as schizophrenic; indeed, so far as we can tell, they're not schizophrenic at all. We're also told that Nash's main problem was that his condition wasn't diagnosed until too late and that this was because he grew up and lived in an environment that ENCOURAGED paranoid delusions. If Nash had a genuinely mental failing it wasn't that he was too clever, but that in certain respects he wasn't clever enough - wasn't able to see through the flimsy Cold War propaganda which many of his contemporaries DID see through; but of course, these people were stupid in THEIR own way, as we all are.
But whatever the precise message, it's a good film. (Let's pretend that the epilogue in which Nash wins the Nobel Prize wasn't included, as it shouldn't have been; it's a glaring irrelevance on the face of a movie that otherwise clearly knows what it's about.) I particularly like the rug-pulling halfway through. We know immediately that the cloak-and-dagger spycraft story isn't real; the details are just too ridiculous, and the situation is just too obviously a response to Nash's unfulfilled desire to fight communism. But the obviousness of this illusion simply helps mask the subtlety of the other one: Nash's imaginary roommate. We ought to have suspected him, for a variety of reasons. But we didn't. At least, I didn't.
I wish the movie hadn't dumbed down its characters' ideas so much, but it gets away with doing so because it concentrates its real attention elsewhere, and it does what it REALLY wants to do very well indeed.