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A Beautiful Mind: John Nash
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A Beautiful Mind (2001) was set during a historical period when not a great deal was known about the nature of mental illnesses, such as Nash's schizophrenia. Many people believed that mental illness was a moral disorder, that a person was ill because he/she was evil or immoral; other people believed that mental illness was purely a matter of "bad genetics" and that nothing could be done except to institutionalize the afflicted individual. Many other opinions - some useful and others useless - existed concerning the treatment of mental diseases.
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This coming January, the movie A Beautiful Mind hits the nation's screens. Inspired by the life of Princeton mathematician John Forbes Nash, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics, this will be the latest in a small but growing list of films in which the central character is a mathematician, among them Straw Dogs (1971, starring Dustin Hoffman as the theoretical physicist), It's My Turn (1980, starring Jill Clayburgh as the algebraist), Good Will Hunting (1997, in which Matt Damon was the combinatorist), and Pi (1998, with Sean Gullette as the tortured discrete number theorist). [See pictures at bottom of page.]
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The movie A Beautiful Mind incorporates these biographical details, but omits others to tell its story using invented characters and plot. In 1951 John Nash was hired at MIT as a Moore Instructor. In 1953 he was promoted to assistant professor for his work on the embedding problem for Riemannian manifolds. The mathematics faculty voted him tenure just before his fifty-day hospitalization at McLean in 1959. In the next thirty-five years, he was involuntarily hospitalized three more times. In 1961 at Trenton State he was aggressively treated to achieve a remission, but he later relapsed and Alicia sued for divorce.
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There is one genuine reemergence in "A Beautiful Mind" and that's Jennifer Connelly, who is touching as Nash's doggedly faithful wife, Alicia. After being relegated to junk movie roles, Connelly has been doing good work for a few years now, in "Waking the Dead" and in last year's "Requiem for a Dream." This, though, is her reentry into the mainstream, and it deserves to be the start of wonderful things for her. Connelly has a knack for responding to a moment with all her emotions while retaining some semblance of composure (the same way she seems on her guard when Nash is wooing her), and that contrast provides the only honest emotion in the movie. It takes a great deal of talent to seem real in a movie as fundamentally dishonest as this one.
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A Beautiful Mind follows the career of John Nash as he searches for the governing dynamics of economics. Like most geniuses, Nash carries himself with equal measures of arrogance and weirdness. He doesn’t try to fit in with his fellow Princeton colleagues, and he understands he isn’t much liked. His chatty roommate Charles keeps Nash’s only social thread intact. Even after his innovative economic theory gives him the coveted position at Wheeler Defense Labs at MIT, Nash continues to search for the next great challenge. That challenge comes with a top-secret code breaking assignment supervised by William Parcher.
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A beautiful mind is a film that draws interest to the life of the amazing John Nash and the destructive and unbearable effects of schizophrenia. This story is delivered with the top-most elloquence from both filmakers and the cast. It holds a level of depth that is clearly evident to thoes who have any interest in the lives of the "greats" in the academic world. "A Beautiful Mind" accomplished the stature of a memorable and enduring classic.
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John Nash