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Nutty Professor
Russell Crowe gnashes Nash in 'A Beautiful Mind'
By Richard von Busack
THE SCHIZOPHRENIC DELUSIONS of John Forbes Nash Jr., according to his biographer Sylvia Nasar: "In his mind, he traveled to the remotest reaches of the globe: Cairo, Zebak, Kabul, Bangui, Thebes, Guyana, Mongolia. ... He was C.O.R.P.S.E. (a Palestinian Arab refugee), a great Japanese shogun, C1423, Esau, l'homme D'Or, Chin Hsiang, Job. ... Baleful deities--Iblis, Mora, Satan, Platinum Man, Titan, Nahipotleeron, Napoleon, Shickelgruber threatened him." And he lived in fear of the apocalyptic Day of Resolution of Singularities.
Forbes, subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, was the Nobel Prize-winning mathlete and madman whose mental illness interrupted a brilliant career. This career included such discoveries as: Nash's Equilibrium in game theory and Nash's Theorem about the embedding of manifolds in Euclidean space. The illness was tragic, but at least Nash was spared, for a time, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and director Ron Howard getting their hands on him. That time has ended.
Not since the film Awakenings has the career of a scientist been subject to such terminal dumbing down. Russell Crowe brings a certain sway to the part of Nash--he's good with bemusement and panic. Still, Howard and Goldsman's anti-intellectual approach to the material insures A Beautiful Mind is a disease-of-the-week film shot in the dullest colors. Crowe's virility is shorted out here for 'Oscar-caliber acting"--the standard sloppy, shoe-gazing, awkward little boy portrait of an intellectual. His Nash is redeemed by true love (Jennifer Connelly, gorgeous as always but unable to draw a bead on her shying co-star). We have the usual tour of Cuckoo's Nest madhouses, before triumphs are received in alarming old-age makeup.
The madman's deliriums--which were more vividly suggested in the film Pi, no doubt inspired by Nash's troubles--are presented as a plain Cold War spy drama, featuring Ed Harris as a spy in a snap-brim hat. Harris is inserted without tip-off into the plot, a clever strategy to make cinema out of the career of a man who spent most of his life staring at a chalkboard. Still, what Nash accomplished and what he saw could have been illustrated so much more thrillingly. As it stands, here's a film about an introverted man who needed a good woman behind him. Only love can cure schizophrenia. Hug a street lunatic today.
Yes, the movie is different from the book, which outlined a fiercely competitive academic world that sometimes strained the sanity of those who lived in it. The movie-shall-be-different-than-the-book law doesn't mean all adaptations of real life must be crapified. Ours is an era when you can tell any kind of story in a movie, so there's no excuse for deleting troublesome subjects--such as Nash's pre-breakdown sex life, which included an illegitimate child, several male lovers and a George Michaels arrest. The "brute mental power" a colleague described in Nash is ignored in creating this fake-prestige movie, topped with a glop of derivative and repetitive James Horner music. Appropriately, it's a soundtrack that's enough to drive anyone insane.
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