A Beautiful Mind
The Other Side of the Fence
The story of A Beautiful Mind, when you get right down to it, is simple, even metaphorical.
It’s like this.
There is, let’s say, a fence. A chain-link fence, a cyclone fence, like we say down here in Texas. On one side there are the people you see every day, the normal, the usual, the (for want of a better word) the sane. And on that side, you can look across and see the others, the different, the outcasts, the… well, let’s not put too fine a point on it… the mad. You can see them, and they can see you. You know the difference; you know what side of the fence you’re on.
But maybe… maybe you get close to the fence. It doesn’t matter why or how. You may have never intended to get that close in the first place. You get up close, and peer through the fence. You reach out to touch the fence. You put your hand right on it, feel the coldness of the metal. Except that it isn’t there. And - it may take you awhile to discover this - the fence is still there, it’s just not where you thought it was, and you’re on the wrong side.
If you’ve been there - even for a moment - then you know.
This is, in a nutshell, what happens to Dr. John Forbes Nash, Ph.D. from Princeton, leader in the complex mathematical concept of game theory, which explains all sorts of intricate social problems, everything from antitrust legislation to the NFL salary cap. At one point - although exactly where is difficult to pinpoint, at first - Nash crosses that hypothetical line and ends up on the other side of the fence.
That’s what the movie is supposed to be about, anyway. The problem with A Beautiful Mind is how it goes about being what it is about, how it fails to tell the story it ought to tell, how it wastes time on irrelevancies.
The biggest irrelevancy in the movie is, unfortunately, one of the most relevant doctrines in all movies. The Iron Law of Hollywood is that all movie stars must always be likeable, must always project that aura of likeability. Dr. Nash here is played by Russell Crowe, who is as big a star as you can get nowadays, so before he ends up on that other side of the fence, he must be likeable. If we don’t like him, maybe we can’t identify with him; maybe by the time he reaches the point where he’s undergoing the worst that 1950’s psychotherapy can throw at him, we won’t recognize him. So he has to be likeable, and the first act of the movie is devoted to that task.
This is more than a little problematic. Dr. Nash is not terribly likeable, by his own admission. Also, he’s a genius, and geniuses aren’t popular. (Holly Hunter in Broadcast News: “No, it’s terrible.”) To make matters worse, he’s a mathematician, and it’s terribly hard to translate that sort of talent to film. (A Beautiful Mind manages this by stealing - over and over again - the scene from Good Will Hunting where Matt Damon draws on the mirror.) Worst, though, Dr. Nash is a twitchy, neurotic, awkward mess, and it takes all of Crowe’s considerable wit and charm to make him likeable. It also takes a good, grown-up performance by Jennifer Connelly, who shows us that Crowe is not only likeable, but also has the potential of being loveable. (Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate: “You just cannot believe, Ben, how loveable the whole damn thing was.”)
All of this is not handled with a great degree of subtlety, so it’s actually a bit of a surprise that the second act is handled with a little more subtlety than you might expect (especially with Ron Howard directing an Akiva Goldsman script, which is about as subtle a combination as Dick Vitale calling a game with Bobby Knight). We know that Dr. Nash is headed for the far side of the fence, but his journey is handled with compassion and concern rather than with the sort of drippy, goopy manner that Hollywood usually handles disability issues. We empathize with Dr. Nash, but we never pity him.
Up to a point, there is a lot to admire about A Beautiful Mind. The acting is superb, the set design is impeccable, the campus locations are gorgeous, and the story is handled with skill and a fair degree of understatement. Unfortunately, though, A Beautiful Mind falls far short of what it needs to be, of what it ought to be. The real meat of the story is in the third act, and it’s the part of the story that is terribly neglected.
You see… or maybe you don’t.
It’s like this.
Maybe you’ve never come across that fence before, maybe you’ve never stood near the edge, maybe you’ve never reached out to touch the cool metal and found yourself on the other side, if even for a moment.
But if you’ve been there - even for a moment - then you know.
You know the challenge. You know how it feels to get up every day, and how just that simple act itself can require all the courage you have and then some. You know how hard it is to simply persevere. You know what can happen when you don’t persevere, too.
The third act of A Beautiful Mind ought to have been about that challenge, about the ongoing struggle of dealing with a mental illness. In Dr. Nash’s case, the struggle is described vividly, but not in any depth. There’s a terrible, relentless sense of speed about the last twenty minutes of the movie, skipping over forty years of Nash’s life in order to get to what the movie thinks is the real triumph of his life. The real triumph, of course, is getting out of bed every day, coping with your demons, living your life; and if it is not the sort of triumph they give Nobel Prizes for, it is no less worthy, no less dramatic, no less important.
If you’ve never been close to the fence, maybe you won’t recognize the arm’s-length treatment that Howard and Goldsman give to Dr. Nash’s illness. Maybe it won’t bother you that the movie skips over the most interesting part of Nash’s life. Maybe you won’t notice the lack of focus on the part of the story that really matters.
But if you’ve been there - even for a moment - then you know.