A Beautiful Mind (film)

A Beautiful Mind
Directed by	Ron Howard
Written by	Sylvia Nasar (book), Akiva Goldsman
Produced by	Brian Grazer Ron Howard
Starring	Russell Crowe Jennifer Connelly Ed Harris Paul Bettany
Cinematography	Roger Deakins
Edited by	Daniel P. Hanley Mike Hill
Music by	James Horner
Distributed by	Universal Pictures (Domestic) DreamWorks SKG (International)
Release date	December 21 2001
Running time	135 min
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	$60,000,000

A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 biographical film directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman. It was inspired by a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1998 book of the same name, Sylvia Nasar's unauthorized biography of John Forbes Nash the Nobel Laureate (Economics) mathematician. The film starred Russell Crowe, along with Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris and Paul Bettany.

The film begins in the early years of Nash's life at Princeton University as he develops his "original idea" that will revolutionize the mathematics world. Later, Nash develops schizophrenia and must endure paranoid and delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss and burden his condition brings upon his wife and friends.

The film's theatrical release was on December 21, 2001, and was well received by critics. It went on to win four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress. It was also nominated for Best Leading Actor, Best Editing, Best Makeup, and Best Score. However, the film has been criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of some aspects of Nash's life.

Production

Producer Brian Grazer originally found the story through an excerpt of the book A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar in Vanity Fair magazine. Grazer immediately purchased the rights to the film. He eventually brought the project to Ron Howard, who had scheduling conflicts and was forced to pass. Grazer later said that many A-list directors were calling with their point of view on the project. He eventually focused on a particular director, who coincidentally was only available at the same time Howard was available. Grazer was forced to make a decision and chose Howard. Grazer then met with a number of screenwriters, mostly consisting of "serious dramatists", however he chose Akiva Goldsman instead for his strong passion and desire for the project. Goldsman's creative take on the project was to not allow the viewer to understand that they are viewing an alternate reality until a specific point in the film. This was done to rob the viewer of their feelings in the same way that Nash himself was. Howard agreed to direct the film based only on the first draft. He then requested that Goldsman accentuate the love story aspect.

Greg Cannom was chosen to create the makeup effects for A Beautiful Mind, specifically the age progression of the characters. Russell Crowe had previously worked with Cannom on The Insider. Howard had also worked with Cannom on Cocoon. Each character's stages of makeup were broken down by the number of years that would pass between levels. Cannom stressed subtlety between the stages, but worked toward the ultimate stage of "Older Nash". It was originally decided that the makeup department would merely age Russell Crowe throughout the film. However, at Crowe's request, the makeup purposefully pulled Crowe's look towards the facial features of the real John Nash. Cannom developed a new silicone-type makeup that could simulate real skin and be utilized for overlapping appliances, shortening the application time from eight hours to four hours. Crowe was also fitted with a number of dentures to give him a slight overbite throughout the film.

Howard and Grazer chose frequent collaborator James Horner to score the film because of familiarity and his ability to communicate. Howard said, regarding Horner "It's like having a conversation with a writer or an actor or another director." A running discussion between the director and the composer was the concept of high level mathematics being less about numbers and solutions, and more akin to a kaleidoscope, in that the ideas evolve and change. After the first screening of the film, Horner told Howard "I see changes occurring like fast moving weather systems." And chose it as another theme to connect to Nash's ever changing character. Horner chose pop singer Charlotte Church to sing the soprano vocals after deciding that he needed a balance between a child and adult singing voice. He wanted a "purity, clarity and brightness of an instrument" but also a vibrato to maintain the humanity of the voice.

The film was shot 90% chronologically. Three separate trips were made to the Princeton University campus. During filming, Howard decided that Nash's delusions should always first be introduced audibly and then visually. This not only provides a visual clue, but establishes the delusions from Nash's point of view. The real John Nash's delusions were also only auditory. A technique was also developed to visualize Nash's epiphanies. After speaking to a number of mathematicians who described it as "the smoke clearing", "flashes of light" and "everything coming together", the filmmakers decided upon a flash of light appearing over an object or person to signify Nash's creativity at work.

Plot

The film opens with John Nash arriving as a new graduate student at Princeton University. He is a recipient of the prestigious Carnegie Prize for mathematics. He meets his roommate Charles, a literature student, who soon becomes his best friend. He also meets a group of other promising math and science graduate students, Martin Hansen, Sol, and Bender, with whom he strikes up an awkward friendship. Nash admits to Charles that he is better with numbers than people, and that he strives for a truly original idea for his thesis paper. He is largely unsuccessful with the women at the local bar. However, the experience is what ultimately inspires his fruitful work in the concept of governing dynamics, a theory in mathematical economics. After the conclusion of Nash's studies as a student at Princeton, he accepts a prestigious appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with his friends Sol and Bender.

File:A-beautiful-mind-3.jpg

Russell Crowe as John Nash

Five years later while teaching a class on Calculus, he meets Alicia, a student with whom he falls in love and eventually marries. While at Princeton, Nash runs into his former roommate Charles and meets Charles's young niece Marcee. He also encounters a mysterious Department of Defense agent, William Parcher. Nash is invited to a United States Department of Defense facility in The Pentagon to crack a complex encryption of an enemy telecommunication. Nash is able to decipher the code mentally. Parcher observes Nash's performance from above, while partially concealed behind a screen. Parcher later encourages Nash to look for patterns in magazines and newspapers, ostensibly to thwart a Soviet plot. After being chased by the Russians and exchange of gunfire, Nash becomes increasingly paranoid and begins to behave erratically.

After observing this erratic behavior, Alicia informs a psychiatric hospital. Later, while giving a lecture, Nash realizes that he is being watched by a hostile group of people. Although he attempts to flee, he is forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric facility. Nash's internment seemingly confirms his belief that the Soviets were trying to extract information from him, and that being taken by the officials of a psychiatric facility was a kidnapping by Soviet agents. Alicia, desperate to help her husband, visits a drop-box and retrieves the never-opened "top secret" documents that Nash had delivered there. When confronted with this evidence, Nash is finally convinced that he has been hallucinating. The Department of Defense agent William Parcher and Nash's secret assignment to decode Soviet messages was in fact all a delusion. Even more surprisingly, Nash's friend Charles and his niece Marcee are also only products of Nash's mind.

After a painful series of insulin shock therapy sessions, Nash is released on the condition that he agrees to take antipsychotic medication. However, the drugs create negative side-effects that affect his relationship with his wife and, most dramatically, his intellect. Frustrated, Nash secretly stops taking his medication, triggering a relapse of his psychosis. While bathing his infant son, Nash becomes distracted and wanders off. Alicia barely manages to save their child from being drowned. When she confronts Nash, he claims that his friend Charles was watching their son. Alicia runs to the phone to call the psychiatric hospital for emergency assistance. Charles, Marcee, and Parcher all appear to John and urge him to kill his wife rather than allow her to lock him up again. After Alicia flees the house in terror, Nash steps in front of her car to prevent her from leaving. After a moment, Nash states "She never gets old." as he observes that Marcee is the same age that she was when he first met her several years before. Only then does he accept that all three of these people are, in fact, part of his psychosis.

Caught between the intellectual paralysis of the antipsychotic drugs and his delusions, Nash and his wife decide to try to live with his schizophrenia. Nash attempts to ignore his hallucinations and not feed "his demons". Nash is growing older while working on his studies in the library of Princeton University. He still suffers hallucinations and periodically has to check if new people he meets are real, mentions taking newer medications, but is ultimately able to live with and largely ignore his psychotic experiences. Nash approaches his old friend and intellectual rival Martin Hansen, now head of the Princeton mathematics department, and receives permission to work out of the library and audit classes. He eventually begins teaching again. He is honored by his fellow professors for his achievement in mathematics, and goes on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his revolutionary work on game theory. Later, Nash and Alicia about to leave the auditorium in Stockholm, when John sees Charles, Marcee and Parcher standing and smiling. Alicia asks John "What's wrong?" John replies "Nothing." With that, they both leave the auditorium.

Cast

• Russell Crowe as John Forbes Nash. A mathematical genius who is obsessed with finding an original idea to ensure his legacy. There was difficulty when casting Crowe, who was well-liked by the producers, when he went to film Gladiator in a different time-zone and was difficult to reach for a extended period of time to attach him to the project.
• Jennifer Connelly as Alicia Nash. A later student of Nash who catches his interest. Connelly was cast after Ron Howard drew comparisons to her and Alicia Nash, both academically and in facial features.
• Paul Bettany as Charles Herman. Nash's roommate and best friend throughout graduate college. The character of Charles was not written to be British. However, director Brian Helgeland provided a tape of Bettany from A Knight's Tale. The filmmakers agreed that the character could be British, based on Bettany's performance in the film.
• Ed Harris as William Parcher. A government agent for the Department of Defense. He enlists Nash to help fight Soviet spies.
• Josh Lucas as Martin Hansen. Nash's rival from his graduate school years at Princeton.
• Adam Goldberg as Sol. A friend of Nash's from Princeton University who is chosen, along with Bender, to work with him at MIT.
• Anthony Rapp as Bender. A friend of Nash's from Princeton University who is chosen, along with Sol, to work with him at MIT.
• Vivien Cardone as Marcee. Charles' nine year-old niece.
• Christopher Plummer as Dr. Rosen. A man who, at least, claims to be a doctor for a psychiatric hospital.
• Judd Hirsch as Helinger. The head of the Princeton mathematics department.

Release

A Beautiful Mind received a limited release on December 21, 2001, receiving positive reviews. It was later released nationally on January 4, 2002. Rotten Tomatoes showed a 76% approval rating among critics with a movie consensus stating "The well-acted A Beautiful Mind is both a moving love story and a revealing look at mental illness." Roger Ebert gave the film four stars (his highest rating) in the Chicago Sun-Times review and gave it thumbs up, along with Richard Roeper on Ebert & Roeper who also stated "this is one of the very best films of the year." Also in 2002, the film was awarded four Oscars for Adapted Screenplay (Akiva Goldsman), Best Picture (Brian Grazer and Ron Howard), Directing (Ron Howard), and Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly). It also received four other nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Russell Crowe), Film Editing (Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley), Best Makeup (Greg Cannom and Colleen Callaghan), and Original Music Score (James Horner).

Controversy

The film has been criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of Nash's life and schizophrenia as well as for the over-simplified representation of the Nash equilibrium. The filmmakers later stated that the film was not meant to be a literal representation, instead being inspired by Nash's life. The difficulty was in portraying stress and mental illness within one person's mind. Sylvia Nasar stated about the film, that the filmmakers had "invented a narrative that, while far from a literal telling, is true to the spirit of Nash's story." The PBS documentary A Brilliant Madness attempts to portray his life more accurately.

The film's more major departures from Nash's life and the Nasar biography include that Nash's hallucinations were exclusively auditory, and not both visual and auditory as shown in the film. It is true that his handlers, both from faculty and administration, had to introduce him to assistants and strangers. No mention is made of Nash's supposed homosexual experiences at RAND. Nash later denied these suggestions. Nash also had an illegitimate son in Boston- although his son from Boston plays a part in the movie, as a nurse who manhandles Nash in the hospital. In 1962, Alicia filed for divorce against Nash. It wasn't until Nash won the Nobel Prize that renewed their relationship.

Nash is shown to join Wheeler's lab at MIT, but there is no such lab. He was appointed as C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT. The pen ceremony tradition at Princeton shown in the film is completely fictitious. The film has Nash saying around the time of his Nobel prize in 1994: "I take the newer medications", when in fact Nash didn't take any medication from 1970 onwards, something Nash's biography highlights. Howard later stated that they added the line of dialogue because it was felt as though the film was otherwise encouraging the notion that all schizophrenics can overcome their illness without medication. Nash also never gave an acceptance speech for his Nobel prize. A deleted scene from A Beautiful Mind reveals that Nash independently invented the board game Hex. Around the time of the Oscar nominations, Nash was accused of being anti-semetic. Nash denied this and it was speculated that the accusation was designed to affect the votes inside the Academy Awards.

DVD Release

A Beautiful Mind was released on DVD in the United States on June 25, 2002 as a two-disc set. The first disc featured two separate audio commentaries from director Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman, deleted scenes with optional commentary from the director, and production notes. The second disc included documentaries such as "Inside A Beautiful Mind" a making-of documentary, "A Beautiful Partnership: Ron Howard and Brian Grazer" detailing the partnership between the director and the producer, "Development of the Screenplay" discussing Akiva Goldsman scripting of the film, "The Process of Age Progression" detailing the makeup effects, "Casting Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly", "Creation of the Special Effects", "Scoring the Film", as well as "Meeting John Nash" displaying the real John Nash. Footage of the real John Nash accepting the Nobel Prize for Economics is also included along with reactions from the winners of the Academy Awards, storyboard comparisons, the theatrical trailer and the soundtrack to the film.

External links

• A Beautiful Mind at IMDb
• A Beautiful Mind at Rotten Tomatoes
• A Beautiful Mind at Box Office Mojo
• Movie Review - Mark Sells, The Oregon Herald
• Page on the web site of Crazy for Cinema, A
• Sylvia Nasar Discusses Her Book, 'A Beautiful Mind;' Psychiatrist Roberto Gil: Schizophrenia and Recovery
• Maths illustrated Interesting details on math consultant Dave Bayer's contribution to film, including his cameo appearance in the pen ceremony scene.
• Beautiful Math: Dave Bayer ’77 writes Hollywood’s Equations.
• A Beautiful Portrayal - Mathematical Association of America column on the film by Keith Devlin

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