Friday, July 10, 2015

A Beautiful Mind (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                 2 hrs & 14 min, color, 2001
                                     
Finding one’s way back!  The way forward, many of us have found, is the way back and vice versa!  I know that I personally, and many friends with whom I am on somewhat intimate terms, have come back from what might have been crippling crises and been forced to navigate into our futures with a different set of bearings than the ones with which we once started out.  But no one in recent times has undergone this testing process more protractedly and painfully than John Nash, the famous Nobel Prize winning thinker and mathematical scientist who just a matter of weeks ago died in an auto wreck at the age of 86 with his wife Alicia. 
                                     
His struggle with paranoid schizophrenia, that began when he was thirty years of age and on the verge of a notable professorial career at MIT, was of epic proportions.  The movie about Nash’s life and struggle, however, is not an epic; it is a small-scale but marvelously composed and brilliantly acted out drama that celebrates the love that had to fight its way through many monstrous barriers to redeem him and make the comeback he has experienced possible.   
                                     
What Nash is noted for within the scientific community is his contribution to Game Theory and Economics.  It was, in fact, for Economics that the Nobel award was given to him.  He was a Princeton graduate, and it was at Princeton that he finally spent the life he had remaining after his recovery.  He did not ask to be taken back onto the faculty, only for the privilege of auditing courses and for the use of its library to do his own continuing research.  It took considerable time for the faculty to be convinced that he was indeed recovered enough to be trusted and before he began to gather about him a student following.  Late in life he was finally reinstated.
                                     
Paranoid schizophrenia is a subject of considerable interest to me, with two members of my extended family so afflicted.  It is difficult for the average person to fathom just how overpowering it can be.  The person literally hears voices and literally sees people and things that do not exist.  Those voices and those mirages can be so compelling that they impair one’s ability to grasp reality.  They can hold a mind and a body captive.  I shudder to imagine just how much of a nightmare its occurrence must have been before modern medicine and psychiatry came into being.  Those who suffered from it were placed under lock and key, written off as “demented” or “possessed by devils.”  It is one of the more rash illnesses that Jesus was supposed to have cured – by nothing more than ordering an “unclean spirit” to “come out of the man.”  But both of these individuals distantly related to me have demonstrated that even for them the real world makes sense when they achieve, however temporarily, a normal grasp of their circumstances. 
                                     
There are some so afflicted who have composed great poetry or painted classic portraitures or written brilliant music.  We have read in recent times about the lack of training the police are given in how to understand and handle such an individual, when s/he is out of control and is a danger to self and surroundings.  Some of these encounters have resulted in needless deaths, when the sick individual out of control is treated like a criminal.  There is a compassionate way to handle them, even if it of necessity involves a form of very tough love.  But it amounts to love just the same, not brutal subjugation.
                                     
Director Ron Howard and his Screenplay Writers Akiva Goldsman and the book’s author Sylvia Nasar had a challenge on their hands deciding how to portray in movie terms the dynamics of the disease, but they had the good sense and the imagination to ensnare the audience in Nash’s darkest periods of delusion.  We viewers for a while are inclined to believe that we hear the voices, that we see what he sees.  We share the fear that he really is being sought out by the FBI, that he really is being roped into Cold War intrigue and held accountable to his overlords for the protection of classified information, that his ability to decipher codes is something his country depends upon for its survival.  The cloak and dagger stuff has the grim feel of familiarity from our past acquaintance with spy novels and motion pictures.  After all, it would not be so unbelievable that our government would force someone of Nash’s genius into working for it. 
                                     
As biopics go, this is evidently more accurate than the average one, at least according to the book’s author Ms. Nasar.  There are details of his life that she developed that the movie omits, but she was generally pleased with the adaptation.  She called it “substantially accurate.”  Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the man is a powerful unearthing of anguish, raw nerve and self-torment giving way over very believable developments to blessed self-discovery.  His work should be a subject of intense examination by any student of acting.   Christopher Plummer also does his usual fine turn in the small role of the psychiatrist who treats Nash, helping him find out the difference between delusion and reality.
                                     
And Jennifer Connelly is quite magnetic in the role of the wife Alicia, who stuck by her husband and father of her child, even through an extended separation, maintaining the role of caretaker.  A most exceptional human being!  She exerts remarkable emotional control and vibrancy while in the grip of consuming emotions.  She and Crowe are a choice pair.  Their scenes together are an intense mix of romantic playfulness and candid confrontation.  They find humor where one would least expect it.  I do not remember two movie characters that I have ever cared so much about; walking with them was an elevating experience, despite Nash’s confessed disinterest in people generally – a solitary person whom Alicia coaxes out of his solidarity.
                                     
There are things that anyone who appreciates this film has to take on faith; I might even say a leap of faith.  How does the endless scrawl of mathematical equations come to serve and influence global trade negotiations, national labor relations and even Evolutionary Biology?  That is a puzzle I daresay my abstract mind could not get itself around. 

And just as demanding of our leaping faith is the claim that Nash has made about how he overcame his demons.  He insists that it was not medications that delivered him but the exercise of a disciplined mind or what he calls a “diet of the mind. I choose not to indulge certain appetites” that are harmful.  There has been much skepticism about this claim, and the screenplay tactfully avoids the controversy by stressing the healing process itself.  Some have voiced disappointment over this, but I have no trouble with it.
                                         
I must confess that it was Nash’s death last month from the accident (an ugly end to the beautiful mind) that revived my interest in the movie.  I had seen it at the time of its release fourteen years ago but had forgotten about it during the long interim.  I suspect that I am one of many in this regard, being as how I had to wait weeks before Netflix could send me a copy; they posted Very Long Wait next to the title on my queue.  But it was worth the wait, because I experienced it this time at a depth that I do not remember having reached the first time.  I can say most ardently that “A Beautiful Mind” is a beautiful motion picture.  It deserves to be rediscovered.

                                     
To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

No comments:

Post a Comment