Based on the biography by Sylvia Nasar
Writer: Akiva Goldsman
Director: Ron Howard
Director of Photography: Roger Deakins
Composer: James Horner
Editor: Mike Hill, Dan Hanley
Lead Actor: Russell Crowe
Year: 2001
A Beautiful mind is a true story (as true as an embellished adaptation can be anyway) about a brilliant man, John Nash, who literally lost his mind. He was a proud man whose sharp intellect began to play tricks on him, causing him to descend into a dark and frantic madness that showed its distress in his health and his relationships. Yet on the bright side, there was apparently some significant discoveries made by this same mind. The illness was a devastating trial for the man, yet his survival and ultimate overcoming is touching. The way in which he was able to rise above his mind games is largely influenced by his wife’s sticking through it with him. Which, judging by the rollercoaster ride of John’s schizophrenia, it wasn’t fun for anyone to be caught in the middle of it.
The beginning of the film shows John Nash’s first days at Princeton University. The images in these parts have a bit of a retro feel and color to them. The palette is golden toned and slightly washed out. This scheme gives things a rather pre-story (or early story) and historical feel. It is here where the principle characters among John’s colleagues are introduced.
In the first half of the movie, Nash is portrayed with some rather silly quirks in relating to the opposite sex. That bit of character was rather unnecessary and crude. Although even before his illness, he did have difficulty relating to people in general. He considered himself having more originality and brains. He himself admitted to not liking people. He desperately sought his own status and a way to distinguish himself, which could very well have been a factor in causing him to slip into his imagined world. Maybe if he was having trouble making it work in real life, his hallucinations could help. Of course they didn’t help, and only made him more insecure and fearful.
It is an epic performance of Russell Crowe. Going from 20 to nearly 70 and merging in and out of schizophrenic behavior, there were a lot of postures he had to portray. He was really a complex character: proud, closed, determined, insecure. He eventually became torn between two lives: one imagined and one real.
Jennifer Connelly, who played Alicia Nash, carried herself a little confident for my taste, but she is certainly beautiful, and was able to portray emotion quite vividly. The sequence with her and John in the hospital is one of her best moments in the movie, in my opinion. She listens as her husband unloads on her his hallucinations that he believes are real. She confronts him with the truth and breaks down in a mix of realization, pity, and helplessness.
There is a cinematography procedure used in a few shots that is interesting. John Nash, with his “beautiful mind”, was often at work figuring out stuff. At times during these thinking sessions, the camera would circle his head, and at least once it would go around a few rotations. This gave a 360 degree view of his mind, if you will.
James Horner’s score is really wonderful. Bright and then brooding, deep and ethereal, it spoke through the ins and outs of John’s life. The use of Charlotte Church’s voice is lively and ingenious. Her voice acted as one of the instruments and was used as a bit of a thematic cue in and of itself. One interesting direction in the scoring was during the night chase sequence. The music is slow and heavy and rather vague. It is an eerie mix with the squealing of tires and gunshots.
A Beautiful Mind tells the story of a free thinking man named John Nash who became enslaved to his mind. He then had to learn to cope with and conquer his illness. The film shares the title of a biography about the now 81 year old man. The film version of the story took plenty of creative license and has some significant alterations to the true story. I think part of what the storytellers wanted to do with this film is give people an opportunity to see through the eyes of a schizophrenic, and thus understand them better. He ultimately learned to ignore his ‘ghosts’, the illusions, giving them no chance to bring him back down that slippery slope from which he climbed.
I also believe the strength love has to mend is shown in John and Alicia’s story. It’s this love that took a man who “was born with two helpings of brain but only half a helping of heart” and taught him that there’s more to life than the intellect. At the end of the movie, as John Nash gives his speech at the Nobel Prize Ceremony (where, by the way, Russell Crowe’s old age makeup job is stunning), he attributes his success and the importance of his life, to the love he shared with his wife.
The beginning of the film shows John Nash’s first days at Princeton University. The images in these parts have a bit of a retro feel and color to them. The palette is golden toned and slightly washed out. This scheme gives things a rather pre-story (or early story) and historical feel. It is here where the principle characters among John’s colleagues are introduced.
In the first half of the movie, Nash is portrayed with some rather silly quirks in relating to the opposite sex. That bit of character was rather unnecessary and crude. Although even before his illness, he did have difficulty relating to people in general. He considered himself having more originality and brains. He himself admitted to not liking people. He desperately sought his own status and a way to distinguish himself, which could very well have been a factor in causing him to slip into his imagined world. Maybe if he was having trouble making it work in real life, his hallucinations could help. Of course they didn’t help, and only made him more insecure and fearful.
It is an epic performance of Russell Crowe. Going from 20 to nearly 70 and merging in and out of schizophrenic behavior, there were a lot of postures he had to portray. He was really a complex character: proud, closed, determined, insecure. He eventually became torn between two lives: one imagined and one real.
Jennifer Connelly, who played Alicia Nash, carried herself a little confident for my taste, but she is certainly beautiful, and was able to portray emotion quite vividly. The sequence with her and John in the hospital is one of her best moments in the movie, in my opinion. She listens as her husband unloads on her his hallucinations that he believes are real. She confronts him with the truth and breaks down in a mix of realization, pity, and helplessness.
There is a cinematography procedure used in a few shots that is interesting. John Nash, with his “beautiful mind”, was often at work figuring out stuff. At times during these thinking sessions, the camera would circle his head, and at least once it would go around a few rotations. This gave a 360 degree view of his mind, if you will.
James Horner’s score is really wonderful. Bright and then brooding, deep and ethereal, it spoke through the ins and outs of John’s life. The use of Charlotte Church’s voice is lively and ingenious. Her voice acted as one of the instruments and was used as a bit of a thematic cue in and of itself. One interesting direction in the scoring was during the night chase sequence. The music is slow and heavy and rather vague. It is an eerie mix with the squealing of tires and gunshots.
A Beautiful Mind tells the story of a free thinking man named John Nash who became enslaved to his mind. He then had to learn to cope with and conquer his illness. The film shares the title of a biography about the now 81 year old man. The film version of the story took plenty of creative license and has some significant alterations to the true story. I think part of what the storytellers wanted to do with this film is give people an opportunity to see through the eyes of a schizophrenic, and thus understand them better. He ultimately learned to ignore his ‘ghosts’, the illusions, giving them no chance to bring him back down that slippery slope from which he climbed.
I also believe the strength love has to mend is shown in John and Alicia’s story. It’s this love that took a man who “was born with two helpings of brain but only half a helping of heart” and taught him that there’s more to life than the intellect. At the end of the movie, as John Nash gives his speech at the Nobel Prize Ceremony (where, by the way, Russell Crowe’s old age makeup job is stunning), he attributes his success and the importance of his life, to the love he shared with his wife. 
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment