PG-13 | 2 h 15 min | Drama | 2001
Director Ron Howard’s film based on the life of American mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. is more a fictionalized fable about the healing power of love than a faithfully accurate biopic. Nash may have won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, but his contributions to “governing dynamics” are nearly impossible to make entertaining for the screen. So, it’s a tribute to Mr. Howard and his crew that the film won four of its eight Oscar nominations.
At Princeton University on a 1947 Carnegie Scholarship, John Nash (Russell Crowe) befriends college mates Martin Hansen (Josh Lucas) and Richard Sol (Adam Goldberg). Nash’s research exploits earn him a place at MIT, and his charming social awkwardness earns him a place in the heart of girlfriend Alicia (Jennifer Connelly).
Married to Alicia, but bored with teaching, Nash runs into the mysterious Agent William Parcher (Ed Harris) who commissions him to decipher encrypted messages from the Soviets that U.S. military intelligence officers have intercepted.
Nash starts spending his days poring over magazines and newspapers hunting for hidden patterns, delivering his findings to a “classified” mailbox. Soon, he’s withdrawing into himself, suspecting that he’s being pursued by Soviet agents led by another mystery man, Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer).
Diagnosed with schizophrenia and for years in a psychiatric hospital, Nash eventually alienates Alicia and their baby after he secretly discontinues medication. But Alicia stays by his side, valiantly trying to nurse him back to health.
Hanson’s empathy overrides the professional envy he may have felt watching Nash’s rise. Ms. Connelly’s outstanding turn as faithful Alicia, torn between hopes for a normal life and the grind of caring for Nash as he rides a rollercoaster of delusion, won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Mr. Crowe tinges his swaggering but tragic Nash with just enough humor and humility to make him lovable. Boxed in by the empty pathos of his equations and symbols, he first strives for “recognition,” whether from “achievement” or not, and then watches helplessly as his fragmenting mind tries to wrest both from his grasp.
James Horner’s soundtrack mirrors Nash’s psychological jolts between hallucination and reality. Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay, adapted from Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nash, expertly draws you into Nash’s worldview, one that masks a painfully real confusion in his mind with a pretended clarity in his imagination.
A Steadfast Love
It’s tempting to be swept up by the virtuosic showcases early in the film of intellectual prowess, Nash’s, or that of his Ivy League buddies. But Mr. Howard briskly moves past his teaser to the main event: Alicia’s love for Nash, how that love is tested and proven, and how Nash struggles, despite his mental misery, to respond to that love.Howard takes his time, introducing Alicia a full 30 minutes in. But from that moment, she becomes Nash’s “governing dynamics,” sensibly and sensitively showing him a warm universe of the heart beyond his cold world of algorithms.
She believes in “deciding” that things will be good luck; he doesn’t believe in luck at all. Ever the logician, Nash asks for “proof” that theirs will be a long-term commitment; she playfully reminds him that as the physical universe is infinite without knowing for certain that it is, so too, love is an act of faith.
As Nash’s psychiatric treatment runs its bruising course, Sol drops by to check in on Alicia, to see how she and the baby are coping. She looks up from the pram and delivers one of the most profound on-screen sermons on marital love that’s severely tested: “Often, what I feel is obligation, or guilt over wanting to leave. Rage! Against John, against God … but then I look at him, and I force myself to see the man that I married. And he becomes that man. He’s transformed into someone that I love. And I’m transformed into someone who loves him. It’s not all the time, but it’s enough.”
Mr. Goldsman and Mr. Howard show, in ways that few filmmakers do, how it’s the heart not the head that “knows the waking from the dream,” how it’s love’s faith and imagination that separates what’s real from what’s unreal, what’s fleeting from what’s lasting and worth preserving. A beautiful mind, it turns out, is Alicia’s.
