A Beautiful Mind
January 23, 2002
7:34 a.m.
We saw "A Beautiful Mind" this past weekend. It's a nice film, quite brilliant in its portrayal of John Nash and his little idiosyncrasies. It's not as good of a film as it could be, I suppose. It leaves a lot of gaps in the story of Nash's life, and has a bit of a rushed feel at the end. But that's picking nits. After it was done, Lisa and I talked about its story structure, which I thought was fascinating. I'm going to talk a bit about this, but I don't want to mess with anyone who hasn't seen it. So, if you haven't seen it, you should stop now. Otherwise, you can go to the rest of today's commentary. I mean it. Don't scroll down if you haven't seen the movie. What I found most interesting about "A Beautiful Mind" was that from a structural standpoint, the real "story" didn't start until about halfway through, when Nash wakes up in the hospital for the mentally ill. Think about that a little. It took me awhile to get comfortable with it. But the "story" here is how one man eventually overcame his disease and lived a "normal" (or at least semi-normal) life. It cannot start until the character understands his situation, and begins to adjust to it. Until Nash goes into the hospital, the primary goal of the presentation of "facts" and "events" is to provide you with character history that is relevant to this struggle. It's really pretty cool, when you think about it. The challenge, in this case is to fool the audience into getting interested in the situation, and then pull the old switcheroo on them, thereby showing that all is not as it seems. The guy behind the curtains is not much of a Wizard, you know? Howard does it, of course, by giving us Nash's schizophrenic point of view without telling anyone that Nash is not a reliable narrator. Now, for those who go into the movie knowing something about it, this may only partially work. But even then, everything is presented so strongly that I defy you to state what is fact and what is fiction the first time through. So, how does Howard do this? Well, he tells a pair of stories. The secret agent story is all inside Nash's head, but is so compelling and so interesting and so believable (because Nash believes in it fully), that it carries your attention. When Nash fails at the end of this story, you're worried for him. Then the very nature of Nash's disease keeps you interested as Howard goes about revealing which parts of Nash's life are true and which are fantasies. In the process, he makes Nash's character sympathetic, and sets up the real world problem in the viewers mind. This works so beautifully becasue Nash and the viewer share a common problem--discovering what is real and what isn't. In context of the big picture, the entire first story is a study in perception and memory. And reality, of course. don't forget reality. In this way, I think it is the movie that "Momento" should have been. It investigates all these things, and even gives you the dipsy-doodle feeling of what it must be like to be a schizophrenic. What must it be like to be someone who knows his perception of reality in not trustworthy? It's an interesting situation. The Salon review of "Momento" praised it for being a movie that required the audience to think. My response to that is that yes, I enjoyed to process of thinking about that movie, but when the end of the logic string came up empty I felt cheated. Though there are still some questions about the events in the end (For example, how much of the Pentagon stuff was real? Did he see Parcher there, or did the image of Big Brother spark his later hallucinations?) "A Beautiful Mind" does not come up empty. This movie has a story that represents what love and diligence and dogged human persistence can accomplish, as well as gives the viewer a study of what reality is or might be. Despite the liberties it took with Nash's life and work, I think "A Beautiful Mind" is an artistic achievement because of its inventive use of story structure to bring out the meaning of various aspects of life. (Anything that can make a mathematician's work interesting to the common layperson has to be fairly brilliant, eh?) It's an artistic achievement for its acting, and for its visual presentation. And it doesn't surprise me at all that both it and "Moulin Rouge" are grabbing most of the post-season awards.  If you're going to reply to his, please E-Mail so as not to put spoilers on the sidebar Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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