Shine

Writer: Jan Sardi, Scott Hicks
Director: Scott Hicks
Director of Photography: Geoffrey Simpson
Editor: Pip Karmel
Composer: David Hirschfelder
Lead Actor: Geoffrey Rush
Year: 1996

The fiddler on the roof has taken up the piano in Scott Hick’s 1996 film of the up and down life of a peculiar character. The story for the most part is true, based off the real life character of David Hellfgot, who was born in 1947.

The first half of the film shows David growing up and finding his talent as a pianist. All this time he was in the holds of a tight-knit Jewish family residing in Australia. Apparently growing up under different circumstances, the patriarch seemed to think his family had things pretty easy and wanted them to never express any discontent. David’s father was an encourager until his skills began to take him from his grasp. The father and son’s relationship was sacrificed when David chose to expand and move his studies to a prestigious musical college in America.

The second half shows David trying to cope with his mental disorder. Somewhere along the way a couple circuits got disconnected, leaving this talented man in a state of abnormality. The outward evidence of the disorder is a chatterbox 90% of whose dialog is pretty much nonsense.

I suppose Geoffery Rush’s performance was worthy of the Academy Award it got him. I certainly couldn’t mouth that kind of tongue ruckus! Rush quite literally bent to give an accurate portrayal. He played a messed-up man who nonetheless asked for your acceptance and care. He was even somehow likeable.

I would also like to award Noah Taylor, who played the adolescent David. What a presence (and a face) that young actor has! (At least he was young then. Mr. Bucket wasn’t till over ten years later). He was convincing playing the 17 year old boy to a 22 year old college student. They were years that, in a lot of ways, defined the man, which is likely why Noah got a significant amount of screen time. During this time, David found the independence he needed, but may not have been ready for the level of which he got.

It was the filmmakers’ intent to avoid pulling the audience out of the story to analyze the piano performances. They wanted things to be able to flow, which I think was achieved. Geoffrey Rush’s piano training certainly helped in this regard. Then to get everything synced must have been quite the editing job!

Dare I say Shine’s heart exceeds that of A Beautiful Mind? It’s certainly not the same kind of epic filmmaking spectacle, indeed, Shine is a simple film. But I do believe it may touch down on meaningful ground that glitz seems to too often overshadow.

The director, Scott Hicks with David Helfgott

A Beautiful Mind

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.