Ron Howard's A BEAUTIFUL MIND

I saw this remarkable film tonight and what an experience. Tackling very tough subject matter indeed, Ron Howard and Russell Crowe managed to take the true story of a brilliant mathematician who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and made it human, extremely moving and very accessible to the public. Let's face it, most people don't relate to a person who's almost as brilliant as Einstein and oh by the way, just happens to be afflicted with severe mental illness. The film had awesome performances, great visuals and a wonderful score. Has anyone in this community seen it?

If there is any justice, Ron Howard will finally win an Oscar for directing this compassionate, beautiful, humane film.

 

I saw it a few weeks ago. I felt it was very well done, with excellent performances throughout. I may just go see it again.

 

I watched it two days ago. Wanted to give it an eight out of ten. If Russell Crowe win Oscar by this movie, it will be a real honour. His acting in ABM is much better than in Gladiator.

A good film.

 

I agree with you. Of course, he had a LOT more to work with in terms of a character.
John Nash is a lot more complex than a Roman soldier.

 

John Nash is a lot more complex than a Roman soldier.

Without getting into which film, or performance is better, Maximus is far more than a roman soldier, He is a general who had devoted his entire life to serving Rome, despite never having seen it, and then in a moment of betrayal, had his family killed and himself thrown into slavery by that very same kingdom.

Why can't ppl praise one thing without degrading another? sheesh.

 

If you see A BEAUTIFUL MIND, you will understand why I made that statement. There's no comparison between the journeys of the two characters. My statement was not intended as a putdown of Maximus or of Russell's performance.

I saw GLADIATOR eight times.

Here's what Roger Ebert said about
A BEAUTIFUL MIND:

The Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches at Princeton, and walks to campus every day. That these commonplace statements nearly brought tears to my eyes suggests the power of "A Beautiful Mind," the story of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians, and a victim of schizophrenia. Nash's discoveries in game theory have an impact on our lives every day.

"A Beautiful Mind" stars Russell Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia, who is pregnant with their child when the first symptoms of his disease become apparent. It tells the story of a man whose mind was of enormous service to humanity while at the same time betrayed him with frightening delusions. Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details. He shows a man who descends into madness and then, unexpectedly, regains the ability to function in the academic world. Nash has been compared to Newton, Mendel and Darwin, but was also for many years just a man muttering to himself in the corner.

Director Ron Howard is able to suggest a core of goodness in Nash that inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope and, in her words in his darkest hour, "to believe that something extraordinary is possible." The movie's Nash begins as a quiet but cocky young man with a West Virginia accent, who gradually turns into a tortured, secretive paranoid. Crowe, who has an uncanny ability to modify his look to fit a role, always seems convincing as a man who ages 47 years during the film.

The early Nash, seen at Princeton in the late 1940s, calmly tells a scholarship winner "there is not a single seminal idea on either of your papers." When he loses at a game of Go, he explains: "I had the first move. My play was perfect. The game is flawed." He is aware of his impact on others ("I don't much like people and they don't much like me") and recalls that his first-grade teacher said he was "born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart."

It is Alicia who helps him find the heart. She is a graduate student when they meet, is attracted to his genius, is touched by his loneliness, is able to accept his idea of courtship when he informs her, "Ritual requires we proceed with a number of platonic activities before we have sex." To the degree that he can be touched, she touches him, although often he seems trapped inside himself; Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the 1998 biography that informs Akiva Goldsman's screenplay, begins her book by quoting Wordsworth about "a man forever voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."

The movie traces his treatment by an understanding psychiatrist (Christopher Plummer), and his agonizing courses of insulin shock therapy. Medication helps him improve somewhat--but only, of course, when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more effective, and he begins a tentative re-entry into the academic world at Princeton.

The movie fascinated me about the life of this man, and I sought more information, finding that for many years he was a recluse, wandering the campus, talking to no one, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, paging through piles of newspapers and magazines. And then one day he paid a quite ordinary compliment to a colleague about his daughter, and it was noticed that Nash seemed better.

There is a remarkable scene in the movie when a representative for the Nobel committee (Austin Pendleton) comes visiting, and hints that he is being "considered" for the prize. Nash observes that people are usually informed they have won, not that they are being considered: "You came here to find out if I am crazy and would screw everything up if I won." He did win, and did not screw everything up.

 

Please calm down.

In terms of character, more complex doesn't mean better. No offence to Gladiator. In fact it won the Oscar, what else do you want?

Still, like John Nash more than Maximus.

 

But I have a little bit problem of the title. After watching it I feel Nash's mind is far more complex than just beautiful.

His mind is extrordinary, unbalanced, tragic... but I can't say it's beautiful. This movie is beautifully done but it gave me creeps.

 

It is unnerving at times. Some of the sequences involving his mental illness, especially involving the infant, are
pretty dramatic.

Perhaps AN EXTRAORDINARY MIND would have been a better title.

 

I believe it's meant as a reference to the old saying "A beautiful mind is a terrible thing to waste." In this case, Nash had a beautiful gift and it would have been a shame if his illness nad caused him to waste his talent.

At least that's my take on the title.

 

I just saw A Beautiful Mind this weekend and was pleasantly surprised. It was nothing like I was expecting, based on the trailer I'd seen I thought it was just another spy drama.
A great film with great performances by Crowe and Connelly, should win some Oscars. Crowe displayed a range of acting I didn't think he was capable of, very impressive.

 

I saw it a few weeks ago, and was definitely impressed. In fact, it was probably the best overall experience I've had at a movie for a few years now.

 

I think by the time the Academy Awards roll around, the whole world is gonna be talking about this amazing film.

Didn't Russell Crowe win a Golden Globe for his performance?

 

*Loved it!* Great film! The acting was great, and the film looked, flowed and ran beautifully!

I never gave Russell Crowe much credit as an actor (sorry), but he did a great job in this movie.

Ronnnie Howard should absolutely get an academy award for the directing. Perfect. Loved the film, can't wait to see it again. I laughed, I cried, etc.

 

Ron Howard should finally be able to shed that name OPIE from the Andy Griffith show, once and for all.

 

"I never gave Russell Crowe much credit as an actor (sorry), but he did a great job in this movie."

you said what I wanted to say, Jar Jar.

 

It really was a beutiful movie. The music, settings, everythign fitted really well.

And Russel Crowe had a brilliant performance. It would be neat if he got two oscars in a row (and if he got on the year before in the insider).


hehe, i feel like a movie critic (brilliant...beutiful...)

 

I think Tom Hanks is one of the few actors to win back to back Oscars. Him, and maybe Spencer Tracy way back when.

 

Did you guys know Ron Howard is bald, except for the little hair around the bottom? He's always wearing a baseball cap, so you'd never know.

I think he shed the child actor stigma long ago with Far & Away and Apollo. He's been a serious director for a long time. And I'll even call him a great director now.

Man!, I use to love the Andy Griffith show.

 

I saw it, I thought it was beautiful. I like the acting, the music, the photography, the way they showed how he saw patterns...

My one complaint: Russell Crowe is too big to play a professor. His arms are frickin' HUGE!

 

The film itself, to me, was mediocre... only because I desired more intricate detail of Nash's achievements and struggles, rather than Ron Howard going for the proverbial tear-jerker trying to squeeze out every possible drop of melodrama from Nash's otherwise nonexciting life. And I don't mean that as an insult...

Nash wasn't an "exciting" individual in the dramatic sense, so I'm sure that the filmmakers had to take certain liberties in telling his life story to make it more palatable for mass audiences.

However, Howard's direction combined with Crowe's acting skill did an excellent job of depicting the aloof, eccentric nature of John Nash. Everything I've read of Nash demonstrates that he is a man who's mind exists on some plane far out of reach of most of us.

It's almost as if he's like Neo from The Matrix and sees the whole world in complex mathematical code. I do like the way they gave visual examples of that in the film... very effective.

However, I feel the film reaches the pinnacle of coming anywhere near being able to truly define John Nash's genius in one scene:

Nash is in the bar with his college buddies and they're talking about scoring with women. Nash's mind suddenly goes into "Ross Perot" mode and we see him visualizing the possible scenarios and their outcomes.

This scene is brilliant because it explains the crux of Nash's world-renowned Equilibrium Theory for Strategic Noncooperative Games. The scene explains the magnitude of Nash's Nobel Prize-winning work so well that even a "waste-oid" like Bender from The Breakfast Club could grasp it.

Essentially, his Equilibrium Theory, which has been applied in economics, quantum physics and even evolutionary science, took the past assumptions surrounding the probability matrix of a "game" (any event in which two or more individuals are competing or cooperating to achieve a certain goal, or goals) and turned them on their head. Nash's theory asserts that individual and collective goals can both be achieved if each individual does what's best for themselves, given the actions of the other individuals.

I thought that this one scene made the film worth watching, even if Howard spent the rest of the film making us sniffle and go "Aww" every five minutes.

 

LOL, I certainly didn't go awww and sniffle every few minutes. Primarily I was intrigued and fascinated and wasn't moved until the narrative built and the full impact of Nash's illness became apparent.
If anything, I thought the script and Ron Howard were relatively restrained in their sentimentality. If it had really been as manipulative as you suggest, they would have removed some of Nash's less endearing traits, such as having virtually no discernible social skills or tact.

The early scene you describe was brilliantly done and you're right, it made game theory understandable to the lay person. That was plenty. To do much more would have lost the vast majority of moviegoers to who do not have a Nobel prize. And the end of the movie included reference to the impact of Nash's accomplishments. The movie's primary focus HAD to be his affliction.

Because of the movie, I pulled up "game theory" and John Nash on google and read some of it. It was fascinating.

I have noticed by the way that Howard excels in simplying things for the masses. There's a scene in Apollo 13 where one crisis involves the air scrubbers in the spacecraft and some re-configuring that the people on the ground have to do. Howard has an engineer spread out all of the objects available to his team and says: "We gotta figure out how to make THAT fit into THIS
using THIS(indicating the materials on the table.) This made a complex technical challenge understandable for moviegoers.

Lots of people have a negative, hair trigger reaction to any kind of emotion in a movie. But that is what movies are all about. At the core, movies MUST connect on an emotional level. There must be an identification process with the characters for the audience to connect with and care about the narrative. That a lot of people are repelled by emotion in a movie tells more about the person than the film.

As much as I love Stanley Kubrick's films, and I love them deeply and have seen them hundreds of times, and respect his brilliance, his icey lack of human emotion in many of his movies is why with an occasional rare exception, they were only marginally financially successful. There's no one to care about.

Anyway, I respect your opinion, and you're entitled to it, of course.

 

The movie's great, but pretty inaccurate. It fails to mention that Nash was a pedophile and a homosexual. Hardly the picture that Howard, Crowe, etc portrayed.

 

That's exactly what I was going to say. Aside from the fact that it's not a great movie. (i.e. I spotted a large portions of his delusions when I was watching it.) They completely changed who John Nash was. He was much weirder and less likeable then was portrayed. He was homosexual (which I don't have a problem with, but it caused him to lose his security clearence) his son was born out of wedlock, and the only reason that he got married, and he didn't ever recover enough to teach again.

Also they changed his delisions (he was really afraid of aliens, not commies), and got many of the symptoms of schizophernia wrong. I was not impressed.

 

Garli, that's an inaccurate statement. (I thought accuracy was a big deal to you). They obviously didn't COMPLETELY change who he was. If they had COMPLETELY changed who he was his name wouldn't have been John Nash and he wouldnd't have been at Princeton. Not only do you sound intellectually arrogant, you misspelled some words. Since we're being so critical, why didn't you get your post perfect? Why didn't you get all the words spelled properly? I was not impressed.

You apparently read the book before seeing the film, and measured it against the book,
but seeing a story and reading a story are two different experiences. What works in a book will not work on a movie screen.

LOL, it sounds like you went into the movie theatre with guns loaded, ready not to like it.

Not only was it a great movie,
it will win Best Picture of the Year
at the Academy Awards in March.

It's amusing that some people think filmmakers are obligated to slavishly follow a real story. John Nash himself is extremely happy with the way the film turned out...and it's HIS life!

Can someone give me the specifics of Nash's pedophilia? I've heard about the homosexual part, but never that. What's the factual basis for the statement?