A Beautiful Mind is an intriguing movie. It tells the story of one John F. Nash Jr., mathematician and Nobel Prize winner for his work in that revolutionized the field of Economics. At the time, Economics was most influenced by Adam Smith who stated "In competition, individual ambition serves the common good." Nash's bargaining theories of bargaining equilibrium and governing dynamics replaced this idea. His theory was explained in the movie as “The maximum benefit to a group can be realized if each individual works for his own benefit and the group's.” This was developed in a bar scene when Nash and his 3 colleagues see a statuesque blonde come in with 4, slightly less beautiful, women. As his colleagues debated over who could get the blonde, Nash played out 3 scenarios. In scenario 1, the four of them try to get the blonde and only end up blocking each other. In scenario 2, after being blocked by the blonde, they go for the four women and are rejected because “no one wants to be thought of as second best." In scenario 3, the four men ignore the blonde and go after the 4 women. In this way, Nash concludes, “We all get laid.” which contradicts the classical theory that individual's should compete for the common good.
Nash is played by Russell Crowe, who has a darn good chance in picking up a second Oscar in as many years for Best Actor. Mathematicians, as a group, are slightly unbalanced to begin with and more socially disconnected from the world than their academic cousins, physicists and computer scientists. In addition to this social disconnection, exemplified by a hysterical scene where Nash tries to pick up a woman in a bar, Nash has the additional affliction of schizophrenia and sees people who aren’t there; brought on, as suggested by the movie, his desire to do something truly original. The other major character in this movie is his wife Alicia, played by Jennifer Connelly. Connelly turns in a marvelous acting performance and perhaps one of the best of her career. She carries the other major thread of the movie – the touching love story of Alicia and John and how Alicia was able to help John through his illness. They are supported by some very strong acting performances by Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer, and Josh Lucas, among others.
The movie is a biography with some Hollywood touches. In reality, John Nash is still a professor at Princeton and still has schizophrenia. For all I know, he still works out of a corner of the library writing on windows. He really did accomplish the things the movie attributes to him. But, at the same time, how do you make a compelling movie out of a mathematician? The director, Ron Howard, and the actors somehow managed to create a biography that feels real and grabs your attention from the very beginning. The movie captures the spirit of the academic Ivory Tower at its most rarefied, competitive, egotistical, and monastic. Crowe and his mathematician colleagues are equal parts arrogance and brilliance, challenging each other and the Universe with enthusiastic hubris. In any of the scenes where Nash is working on a mathematical problem or searching for a pattern, you sense that he’s no longer in the real world and are taken, for a brief moment, into that unreality. As for his insanity, the movie does an excellent job of coaxing you into his unreal world as he descends into and out of paranoia.
There are some potentially silly moments in the movie that will make the nitpickers out there terribly happy. One scene has Nash in his undershirt, entering a classroom, having absent-mindedly left his office without coat or tie. Crowe has traditionally played large and aggressive men such as Maximus in Gladiator and Bud White in L.A. Confidential. That created a moment of disconnection for me as I thought to myself “That is not the body of a mathematician.” (Having read A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, I now know that Crowe's physical portrayal was accurate. John Nash is described often by friends and colleagues as a 'powerfully-built' man.) Also, the writers knew their limits in this movie and did their best not to pretend to be expert mathematicians or economists. Technical explanations are kept as simple as possible in the dialogue. But every now and then, a stupid thing slips through. But these bits are so minor when held up to the amazing performance of Crowe who took Nash, an ‘odd duck’ of a character, and played him with absolute precision across his lifetime.
