comment a beautiful mind

I wasn't actually planning on going to see "A Beautiful Mind" in the first place, but as it was, I was convinced by the friend that accompanied me that it was truly something to see. And now, after seeing it, I thank her for that. Instead of spending two and a half hours watching George Clooney and Matt Damon rob casinos or Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore dealing with their problems in New Foundland, I found myself pulled into another kind of story, a powerful, emotional story of how one man learned to battle his own demons and dazzle the world.

"A Beautiful Mind", based on the novel by Sylvia Nasar, is the story of John Forbes Nash Jr., the genius mathematician, whose life suddenly takes a turn for the worse when he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After fierce battles with his inner self, he overcomes this and returns to win the Nobel Prize in 1994 for his brakethrough game theory in economics that he had been working on during his years in Princeton University in the 1950s.

John Nash, portrayed very well by the versatile and brilliant Russell Crowe, is a partly shy, yet ironic and sometimes even arrogant, gifted young student studying in Princeton University in the late 1940s. He dedicates his time to numbers and equations, set on to solving every problem at hand, rather than mingling with

co-students on the football field or in the pub.

Nash is later on introduced to Sylvia (played by the lovely Jennifer Connely), a physics student attending his classes. She helps Nash to open up and eventually discover love.

Enter William Parcher (played by Ed Harris), a shadowy and mysterious agent working for the Department of Defense. Parcher, after realizing Nash's ability to see mathematical and geometrical patterns everywhere, approaches Nash with a mission that involves national security.

Now, amidst his work and relationship, Nash is suddenly thrown into a whirlwind of emotions and disbeliefs as he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. And this is the part where "A Beautiful Mind" truly shines: in portraying the disorder from Nash's own point of view. In a powerful and emotional way, it shows the viewer how difficult an illness like this can be to not only face, but overcome, something that people today may not always realize.

Before seeing this movie, I must admit that I was a bit afraid that casting such a well-known actor as Russell Crowe as the main character would ruin the image of John Nash, forcing the viewer to see Crowe, rather than Nash. This is a common problem when dealing with famous actors, but to my surprise, it didn't much bother me much. And the same goes for Ed Harris.

As a movie, "A Beautiful Mind" is absolutely great (It is so much more, but I cannot find the words to praise it enough, so I will simply go with "great" =). Not only does it have a strong point and an importaint message to the viewer, but it delivers it in a touching and sensitive, partly even humourous kind of way, with the help of powerful actors, a great screenplay and even a few special effects to boost it up. So for anyone whose grown tired of the consant pointless action-movies out there, and instead want to immerse themselves into a character-driven story that might actually bring a tear to your eyes, I sincerily recommend "A Beautiful Mind".

纳什获诺贝尔奖时的演讲

Nash: Thank you. I've always believed in numbers ，in the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, "What truly is logic? Who decides reason?" My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional -- and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found. I'm only here tonight because of you （his wife, Alicia）. You are the reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you.

纳什：谢谢大家！我一直以来都坚信数字，不管是方程还是逻辑都引导我们去思考。但是在如此追求了一生后，我问自己：“逻辑到底是什么？谁决定原由？”我的探索让我从形而下到形而上，最后到了妄想症，就这样来回走了一趟。在事业上我有了重大突破，在生命中我也找到了最重要的人：只有在这种神秘的爱情方程中，才能找到逻辑或原由来。今晚我能站在这儿全是你的功劳，你是我成功的因素，也是唯一的因素。谢谢你！

Plot

John Nash is a mathematical whizz struggling to come up with a truly original idea with which to make his name. Later in life, however, a stint code-breaking for the government results in creeping paranoia and a gradual slide into schizophrenia.

Review

Playing the mentally ill has always been a fast-track to critical and Oscar success, and so it proved for Russell Crowe, who bagged a third successive nomination for his performance as mentally-ill maths genius John Nash in Ron Howard's glossy biopic, which won Best Picture in 2002.

Crowe's off-screen contretemps with a Bafta official apparently cost him the chance to follow up on his Gladiator gold and follow in the footsteps of Geoffrey Rush (Shine), Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot) and Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man), but there's no denying that his crowd-pleasing performance is this movie's trump card.

Essentially it's that old chestnut, the inspirational biopic and Howard skilfully yomps us along the well-worn path of early promise (success at sums!), catastrophic downfall (going bonkers!), and a final, emotionally-charged triumph over adversity (winning the Nobel Prize!). The problem is that, even if you haven't read the book on which it's based, you're left with the niggling suspicion that this is all too neat to be anything near the whole story. As indeed turns out to be the case.

Nash's bisexuality, a child out of wedlock and a divorce are all AWOL, while the

feel-good ending neatly skips over the horrible, irreparable reality of a professional and personal life effectively ruined by insanity. Of course, any biopic smoothes the edges and has to construct a story out of the messy realities of life, but here there's a sense that the manipulation borders on dishonesty.

None of which is to deny that there are very good things as well. Crowe marshals his tics with showy aplomb, Howard displays his usual facility for smoothly-engineered filmmaking, and Akiva Goldsman's (yup, he of Batman & Robin) screenplay delivers

the necessary dramatic wallop and a craftily shocking reversal.

Support is generally good, especially from Paul Bettany, last seen whooping it up as Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, and the movie's only Oscar-winning

performance from Bettany's future missus, Jennifer Connelly, here playing the

put-upon and long-suffering Mrs. Nash. But in the end, Howard's film's undoubted effectiveness conceals a disappointingly cynical heart.

Verdict

If this were fiction, it would be an example of superior storytelling, and it's certainly gripping. Whether you can fully enjoy its many strengths depends on how

comfortable you are with a real, tortured and ultimately tragic life being forced into Hollywood's formulaic straitjacket.

A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a touching, emotionally charged film detailing the life of a brilliant academic who suffers from schizophrenia. This affliction slowly takes over his mind and we watch as his life crumbles apart around him. He abandons his students, alienates his colleagues and replaces his research with a fruitless and all-consuming obsession. Eventually he is taken into hospital where he is forced, with the help of electric-shock therapy and regular medication, to accept his condition and attempt to repair the shattered fragments of his life.

He succeeds. Of course he succeeds, this is Hollywood and Hollywood likes a happy ending. In this case the happy ending is that, as an old man and after years of struggle, the poor academic is awarded the Nobel Prize. One interesting point though; it's a true story and our hero is none other than John Forbes Nash Jr.

As a young man, John Nash was a mathematical genius. In 1947 he went to Princeton on a Carnegie Scholarship, and after three years had produced a 27-page dissertation for his doctorate in which he greatly expanded the field of Game Theory, transporting it from a position of relative obscurity into one of almost universal relevance.

In the 1920s the father of Game Theory, Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, had shown that mathematical models could be used to explain the behaviour of players in simple games. His work was limited in scope however, and although interesting, it appeared to be of little practical use.

Nash's dissertation expanded on von Neumann's work, showing how Game Theory could explain complex as well as simple competitive behaviour. It wasn't a comprehensive solution to all game situations, but it did lay the foundations for the huge body of work on Game Theory which has been produced since.

Unfortunately, very little of this comes across in A Beautiful Mind because the director (Ron Howard) seems more interested in making a film about a schizophrenic than a mathematician suffering from schizophrenia. At the start of the film we are shown a Hollywood template of a typically obsessive young academic, introverted, socially inept, dismissive of his colleagues' work. If the notes we see Nash scribbling on his windows were chemical formulae or rhyming couplets rather than mathematical equations, the character would have seemed equally plausible. This is not to say that Russell Crowe, who plays Nash, does a bad job. Indeed, he succeeds in

giving his character a convincing plausibility rarely seen in mainstream cinema these days, and he was certainly a deserving Oscar nominee. It's just that we never see him doing any maths apart from the occasional scribbling on windows.

And when his great breakthrough finally comes, Nash is not poring over his books in the library or gazing fixedly at his glass equivalent of a blackboard, he's in a bar, eyeing up a group of attractive young women. How visually convenient.

But to be fair, this is a dramatisation based on Sylvia Nasar's best-selling book, not a documentary. Its aim is to entertain, not to enlighten, and it does this perfectly well. Russell Crowe produces probably his best performance to date and is equally convincing as both the awkward young genius and the tortured convalescent, struggling to rebuild his marriage and career. Jennifer Connolly (who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) is excellent as Alicia, Nash's long-suffering wife, and there are several strong performances from the supporting cast, most notably Ed Harris as a mysterious character from the military and Paul Bettany as Nash's Princeton roommate.

But Hollywood requires more from its films than a few good performances; it requires drama, action, romance, pathos, excitement. A Beautiful Mind makes a fair attempt to include all of these ingredients and the results obviously satisfied producers and film-goers alike - it won Oscars for Best Film and Best Director. But for those expecting to see a film about mathematics it is unlikely to satisfy. Early in the film, John Nash describes himself as having "two helpings of brain and half a helping of heart". A Beautiful Mind seems the exact opposite.

A Beautiful Mind is a beautifully written, effectively acted, and meticulously crafted

effort that is likely to remind many viewers of a simple axiom: a movie doesn't have to be groundbreaking to be compelling. Originality is a prized commodity because there is so little of it in Hollywood these days, but, when filmmakers do such a skillful job with familiar elements, their efforts should be acknowledged. Affecting without being overtly manipulative, A Beautiful Mind tells the life story of John Nash, a Nobel prize winner who struggled through most of his adult life with schizophrenia. As directed by Ron Howard, this becomes a tale not only of one man's battle to overcome his own disability, but of the overreaching power of love - a theme that has been embraced by films as diverse as It's a Wonderful Life and Rocky.

A Beautiful Mind may have been developed to be a crowd-pleaser as well as a

tear-jerker, but genuine craft is evident in the way the pieces were assembled. The movie never becomes cloying, nor does it threaten to drown us beneath an

outpouring of false sentiment. This is no Patch Adams, filled with saccharine-coated artificiality. The characters are effectively drawn and their plight touches an emotional chord. A Beautiful Mind offers a catharsis without insulting the intelligence. Sadly, too few movies these days can make a similar claim. This film argues that there are still instances when Hollywood-produced, big budget movies are worth a viewer's

investment of time and money.

A Beautiful Mind purports to tell the true story of Professor John Nash (Russell

Crowe), but, while the gross facts may be accurate, one must expect embellishment of the details. Narrative features are not constrained by the same rules that limit

documentaries. We first meet Nash as a student at Princeton in 1947. He is brilliant but erratic - a mathematical genius who lacks social skills. He is aided in making it through those difficult years by his roommate, Charles (Paul Bettany). Years later, following an astounding breakthrough that revolutionizes economics, John is teaching at M.I.T. and doing code-breaking work for a shady government agent, William Parcher (Ed Harris). It's at this time that John meets, falls in love with, and marries Alicia (Jennifer Connelly). But his happy world soon starts to crumble. John is afflicted with paranoid hallucinations; by the time he is taken to a mental hospital under the care of the mysterious Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer), he is diagnosed as having an advanced case of schizophrenia.

For Russell Crowe, the winner of last year's Best Actor Oscar, this is another opportunity to broaden his range. Crowe successfully buries his personality beneath Nash's, allowing the character to come to the fore (a necessity, considering the actor's current load of off-screen baggage). Much as he did in The Insider, Crowe shows no difficulty inhabiting the skin of a real-life individual who has a stronger intellect than physique. And, when it comes to the sequences depicting Nash battling his demons, Crowe's performance is utterly convincing. Meanwhile, Jennifer Connelly is luminous as Alicia. Although the showier performance belongs to Crowe, it is Connelly's complex work, depicting a woman torn by love for and fear of the same man, that elevates the film to a higher level. The actress was unjustly overlooked for Requiem for a Dream; hopefully, the Academy will not repeat that mistake. Solid support is provided by Ed Harris and Christopher Plummer.

A viewer certainly doesn't have to be a mathematical expert to appreciate what A Beautiful Mind offers, although those with a strong left-brain component may relate better to John Nash than right-brainers. The movie tosses mathematical theories and theorems in the audience's direction, but explains them simply and lucidly; no one is going to become lost or bored. A Beautiful Mind isn't about mathematics except as a symbol. It's about human frailty and the ability to triumph over it. Nash could just as easily be a doctor, a lawyer, or a construction worker and the essence of the story would not change.

The strength of the writing and production values elevate A Beautiful Mind far above "disease of the week movie" quality. At the core of the picture lies the relationship between John and Alicia, and the tribulations that the strength of their bond allows them to overcome. On one occasion, a friend asks Alicia how she can continue to stay with her stricken husband, and she replies with a succinct explanation that everyone who has ever been in love will understand. A Beautiful Mind defies the conventional Hollywood wisdom that love is passion and romance. For John and Alicia, it is painful, heartbreaking work. And, while hearts and flowers are great for a fantasy, this is the kind of expression of emotion that touches a deeper chord.