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Finding Beauty In the Creation of Order
From Disorder
If awards are significant, then we can take confidence in
the only film critic ever to win a Pulitzer, Roger Ebert's,
assertion that "The Mummy is a good popcorn flick.
The Mummy Returns is a bad popcorn flick." Why
should we accept this contention? "Because it's my job
to know these things," he wrote. I guess they can't revoke
awards for smugness, so let me tell you that it's my job to
know the difference between good Oscar bait and bad Oscar
bait. A Beautiful Mind is Oscar bait to the highest
power, a rare film when the random elements of filmmaking
align in a formula equaling near-greatness.
Biography films usually try to "get inside" the
genius of their subject, to show lay people what separates
us from them. Serviceable efforts usually result when a director
orbits around a good, sometimes great performance. Michael
Mann's Ali is a serviceable bioepic; it gives us a
vivid external impression of genius. We're mostly watching
Will Smith do an impression of Ali; we're left to figure out
how he sees the world, gauging the reactions of those around
him. Ron Howard—yes, EdTV Ron Howard—performs
the miracle of actually making our vision on the screen the
vision of the genius. We are introduced to John Nash, fuddling
flat-footed about the Princeton courtyard, uninterested in
his classmates' yammering about their various accolades. One
chap has a rather unfortunate sense of style, but rather than
tritely insult him, Nash holds a patterned glass to the sun,
Howard shows us refracted patterns of light that take shape
in a punch bowl, which Nash then displaces onto the neckwear,
replying, "There must be a formula for how ugly your
tie is."
Howard and screenwriter Alkiva Goldsmith achieve many such
moments, and whether by sleight-of-hand or Hollywood magic,
Nash's world becomes ours. Where we see chaos in funny symbols,
he sees clarity. Where we see the natural progression of courting
rituals, Nash sees unnecessary calculations leading to the
fluid exchange of sex. But we reconcile these perceptions
by landing at common destinations. For instance, he disputes
Adam Smith's Invisible Hand by describing how best his group
of buddies at the bar can each get laid. I know this sounds
hokey, but his logic is so precise and the scene so swift
that I couldn't help but fall for the trick. Howard and Crowe
may be pulling rabbits from hats, but it's a Houdini-quality
jest.
Russell Crowe rekindles the internal suffering of Jeffrey
Wigand from The Insider, but he dresses it with the
rapid, muffled speech and fudgy walk of a prodigy. His head
twitches in contemplation, as if the thoughts are processing
so rapidly that they jostle his skull like electrons orbiting
a nucleus. The Crowe intensity that manifests itself in bar
fights and sour looks at the Oscars becomes the confused anger
of a man unable to bend the world to his will. It's a better
performance than his screenmate's Jackson Pollock, partially
because the direction compliments it so well. Imagine if Ed
Harris had let the screen splatter and drip, Pollock's physical
world melting into abstract expressionistic screen compositions.
Here, Crowe plays off Howard's compositions of newspaper articles
and starry skies transforming into perfect geometries
And then there's Jennifer Connelly—yes, the young woman
who took the double-headed black dildo in the ass in Requiem
For a Dream. If that's what it takes to get you ready
for Russell Crowe, then so be it. She is forced to carry the
emotional weight of the film, and she finds the courage to
stand up to Russell Crowe the actor. This is no light task:
the last time an actress did it, Kim Basinger won an Oscar.
Connelly doesn't settle for making Alicia a paper-thin, passive-aggressive
housewife, as, say, Meg Ryan would have. She paints a spectrum
of emotion from the sugary flirt (they court via rational
vectors and drawing shapes with stars) to the internally enraged
mother. Alicia is strong enough to be worth fighting for,
even for Bud White.
The film itself flirts with typical Hollywood irony. To become
a success, the hero must be defined by those very standards
he rejects at the outset of his journey. But for John Nash
this is a necessary element of his schizophrenia. He holds
such disdain for the conformity factory of the university
that he has to invent a world worthy of his talents, only
to reconcile these notions to regain his sanity. His mentors
speak of "accomplishments," and they have a point—one
man's hallucinations are another man's genius, the difference
lying in one's ability and will to express them. Nash's genius,
we're made to believe, is his ability to create order from
chaos, to create cohesion from disparate sequences, so naturally
when variables he could not control—women, children,
love—are introduced into his life's equation, internal
chaos ensues. The methods by which he becomes focused emasculate
him of his gift, and we see that the genius and the sickness
are one in the same. And the genius—a worthy word—of
the film is the clarity of the point: the audience gets the
sensation of witnessing an optical illusion come into focus.
Because of his gift, John Nash's physical well-being is a
function of his abstract thirst for order, and the film exalts
itself by exploring these connections between math and beauty.
He bends the physical world to compensate for what he cannot
comprehend in his mind. "Ugly" is how he percieves
entropy in his mind, and he's right: there is beauty in mathematics.
Chaos theory tells us that if you consider something long
enough, eventually a pattern will emerge that our brain will
comprehend as beauty. A humanist might be disgusted at the
notion that beauty can be quantified in fractals, but I find
it rather hopeful. As a kid, I stared at the boiling mud pits
in Yellowstone National Park, and I remember a ranger telling
me that even something as ugly as mud will develop into something
beautiful because, if you look at it long enough, you'll begin
to tell where the bubbles are going to come up. He's right,
and I think that's what Ron Howard is trying to convey about
John Nash. His schizophrenia is a dangerous intensity of how
we feel affecting how we perceive, with how we feel, and hence
our physical well-being, grounded in our ability to make sense
of the chaos of the world. I think we can all empathize with
that.
I did have a problem with—Minor Spoiler Alert—the
scene suggesting that "true love," as Connelly runs
her hands down Crowe's arm, can "overcome the odds"
and defeat his disease. Perhaps the film is suggesting that
our processing of stimuli—no matter the mode or intensity—is
a means to the same end of pleasure. Or perhaps that the physical
sensations which ignite the brain can transcend our abstract
need for clarity—that an orgasm is more powerful than
solving a puzzle. So what we perceive algorithmically in nature
and numbers as beauty is compounded with the sensations derived
from our emotions, evoking what we term "love."
Or the scene is a bullshit Hollywood "Love Overcomes
All Odds" cop-out.
Either way, those two actors in that moment generate enough
emotional intensity to transcend the rationale of the situation.
We cannot quantify, or as reviewers put it "offer an
explanation" as why some genius dies while another thrives.
Yes, there are medicines and techniques, but rarely, in my
experience, does any of it take hold without the positive
reinforcement of those the genius feels strongly about. And
it's a simple truth: the sensations resulting from human interaction
can be the most powerful persuaders of mind. That's what separates
us from the computers, I guess, especially at the movies.
Though virtually a human computer, John Nash does achieve
both sense and sensibility, eventually—so he blissfully
rides his bicycle through a Princeton courtyard in the shape
of the symbol for infinity: the secrets of poetry and mathematics
spoken in a single image. Wow. Not bad for that little redhead
from Mayberry. Movies are not an empirical form; they are
colored by the situation in which we see them. Maybe I saw
A Beautiful Mind in a moment when the chaos outside
the theater floated away and, for once, the screen came into
focus.
Addendum: This is my review as I wrote upon returning from
the theater. In the next week or so, I will revisit the film.
This is my honest emotional reaction to it, which I will reevaluate
after some research. I've thought about it differently since,
and you'll see the results of that contemplation later.
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