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.
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