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A Beautiful Mind

Posted in B Movies, Drama | January 13th, 2012

A Beautiful Math

Plot:

A beautiful Mind is a semi-biopic of the famed mathematical genius John Forbes Nash, Jr. (Russell Crowe) and his lifelong struggles with his mental health. Nash enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton in 1948 and almost immediately stood out as an odd person. He devoted himself to finding something unique for his doctorate, a mathematical theorem that would be completely original. His only reliable friend during Princeton time is his roommate, Charles Herman (Paul Bettany).

Soon, John Nash becomes a professor at MIT where he meets and eventually married a graduate student, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly). Over time however John begins to having delusions and lose his grip on reality, eventually being institutionalized diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. As the depths of his imaginary world are revealed, Nash withdraws from society and it’s not until the 1970s that he makes his first foray back into the world of academics, gradually returning to research and teaching. In 1994, John Nash was awarded the Nobel prize in Economics.

Release Date: December 21, 2001
Distributor: Universal Studios (US) and DreamWorks (non-US)
Directed by: Ron Howard (Cocoon, Apollo 13, Ransom, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons)
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Christopher Plummer, Josh Lucas
Budget: $60 million
Gross Revenue: $170,708,996 (US), $313,542,341 (worldwide)

Review:

Although based on real-life story, the elements in A Beautiful Mind are actually something that we’ve seen often in Hollywood’s drama. A brilliant youngster gets bullied in university, a genius who’s also mentally-ill, and a love story between beautiful hot lady with a nerd, are some cliches that you can easily get from other movies. Fortunately, this film offers much more than that. Director Ron Howard was successfully mixed all those elements into a combination of drama, thriller, and romance, with some fun scenes here and there.

The movie is started with a rather slow pace, tells the story of young John Nash when he was attending Princeton as graduate student. Only with his roommate Charles Herman that support him, Nash desperately seeking for a breakthrough in mathematical theorem. Besides to make the audiences understand the whole personality of John Nash, this first third half of the movie also filled with math talks, which might be fun for some of you.

The mid-part is the best part of the whole film. It’s started with the romance between Nash, now a professor in MIT, with one of his student, Alicia Larde. As John Nash is a very “weird” person, the love-story is filled with many awkward yet sweet moments, sometimes added with funny dialogues. Later after they married and Alicia is pregnant, Nash started to show signs of paranoid. He, who secretly works as a spy for US government, feels that his life is endangered, that some Russian agents are tailing him. At this point, audiences will wondering who’s right, doctor who says that Nash is having a delusions and actually never a spy, or John Nash himself is right and he’s actually an agent who’s trying to stop the next nuclear war.

Whichever one is true (as I won’t spoiled for you who haven’t seen the movie), now the life of John Nash is devastated. He then must fights with himself and regains his senses, so he can start to rebuild his relationship with his wife, as well as his career in education.

Russell Crowe was brilliant in this movie, as he can made the character very believable. Not only as a delusional schizophrenic genius, but also how he turns his character from a young graduate student until becomes a Nobel Prize winner 47 years later!

A Beautiful Mind also comes with few flaws, as we always expecting from Hollywood’s biopic. They’re basically come from some over-dramatic scenes, especially from the romance part, such as the way John and Alicia even started seeing each other wasn’t very realistic, and why Alicia would stay with John after he becomes distant (the real John Nash and Alicia Larde were actually divorced around the time Nash was hospitalized, and only remarried again in 2001).

It’s nice to see a mathematician takes the main role of a movie, especially if it’s a real-life genius and Nobel Prize winner like John Nash, which the brain kinda makes me envy, as I still need to access an online calculator to do a simple algebra .