Sylvia Nasar quoted a quote from Nash's colleague in Mathematician Nash's biography "Beautiful Mind": "All mathematicians live in two different worlds at the same time. One is a platonic, icy and pure world; at the same time they have to live in a short, chaotic, and constantly adaptable real life." Mr. Nash’s life is a typical example of this dilemma, but it is also A special case, because he not only lives in the above two worlds, but now there is a third world: the dream palace of the mediocre Hollywood film market, where all kinds of ambiguous factors melt into their self-confident clichés and Freshly cheated in tears.
Tears and dazzling light accompany them, and they feel that all this has come with peace of mind. The absurd thing is that in this film, directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman, the seemingly innocent emotions in it are almost entirely fabricated.
First, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), an MIT student who is going to marry Nash, happily ran into Nash's office and waved the manuscript in her hand. She just proved an extremely perverted hypothesis. Her mentor and future husband looked away from the paper coffee cup he had just drunk and glanced at Alicia’s proof, “It’s subtle, but it’s wrong.” He said that the judgement he gave was quite in line with a “beautiful soul".
Let us step back and look, from mistake to subtle. Mr. Nash is 73 years old this year. This embarrassing and talented man possesses the most outstanding mathematical ability of his generation. When he was in his early thirties, a mental illness severely affected his creative ability, and he had made outstanding achievements in game theory, quantum mechanics, number theory and many other fields. After more than 30 years of fighting against schizophrenia, he seemed to have been miraculously forgiven by God. In 1994, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in recognition of his work in economics at Princeton University in the late 1940s. Achievement.
On the whole, Mr. Nash's ups and downs' life fits the narrative structure of the movie's desire: the glorious life was miserable and finally relied on the tenacious spirit to win. However, as Miss Nasar said in the previous economic report for The New York Times, looking closely at his life, there are many fascinating or terrible stories. Mr. Nash can be regarded as a prime number in an industry with a weird reputation in mathematics. His anti-social violent temper and his cruel and dangerous insults and pranks are notorious among his colleagues.
Before he married Alicia, they had a child named John. At the same time, he was also the father of another child named John, who was born to him by the same woman named Eleanor Stiers, and Nash later deserted them. He has strong and obvious sexual relations with many men. He was even arrested for asking to have sex with someone in the men's bathroom in Santa Monica, California, and therefore lost his position in the research and development company ( RAND) position. When his illness got worse and his behavior became more and more intolerable, Alicia divorced him (they remarried in June last year).
We can't see all of the above in the movie. What's worse is that those whitewashed academic and political experiences have shaped his genius and madness together into a monument. The movie "Beautiful Mind" began with a fictional Professor Helinger (Judd Hirsch) speech. The speech said that American mathematicians played an important role in the war against the Nazis, and now they should turn their attention to resisting Soviet communism.
This scene and the following story oversimplified the suspicious academic world during the Cold War. At that time, many mathematicians and scientists sympathized and supported socialism, including MIT, where Nash went to teach after leaving Princeton (rather than leading a classified defense study afterwards, as in the movie), of course more Of people are skeptical of socialism (this includes Robert Oppenheimer mentioned later). Nash is not among them. He is portrayed as a fearless cold-blooded soldier by Director Howard and Mr. Goldsman. Even in the research and development company (RAND), a think tank of the Department of Defense, he was more willing to conduct pure theoretical research rather than practical application. In 1960, he even tried to give up his American citizenship and establish a world government.
Obviously, all of these are too unbearable for the audience, and any real events that will reduce the audience's sympathy are smeared out, leaving a shy and lovely image of genius. Of course, any film derived from a biography will modify, whitewash, emphasize or compress the original work, but "Beautiful Mind" goes further and becomes the same history as "JFK" or "Forrest Gump" A revisionist film, and depressingly shows an underestimation of the audience's wisdom.
How much of the truth claimed by the film is the original face of history? For this question, film writers are more interested than filmmakers. In any case, this did not bother Mr. Howard. However, if there are no such suffocating objections, or do not believe in these things, or even ignorantly retort that this is just a movie, then this movie is worthy of its own language to judge. Perhaps, to borrow the rules of mathematical notation, this movie can be called "Nash Prime Number" or simply called Nashi (i stands for imaginary number). This story of Nash did not lose its beauty.
On the one hand, Miss Connelly is a keen and lively character in the play. She started as a math enthusiast and then became the wife of this restless and troubled man. Other actors, including the federal agent played by Ed Harris, the psychiatrist played by Christopher Plummer, the British dude played by Paul Bettany, and the school athlete who likes mathematics played by Josh Lucas, are all trying to prevent themselves from becoming one in the play. Dispensable role. Roger Deakins used his elegant film techniques to turn the post-war Princeton University into a sweet paradise.
However, Russell Crowe was able to insist. He rejected every opportunity to overplay the role. Too many opportunities to show off can not be a good performance of a genius or a madman, even like Dustin Hoffman (``Rain Man'') and Jeffrey Rush (``Shine'') Talented actors are also difficult to do.
Russell Crowe used his extraordinary concentration to show us a person who lives almost completely in his own inner world. He has nothing to do with the dramatic display of the characters’ hearts: a vague smile hangs on Nash’s mouth, The speech was light and hesitating, with a southern accent (Nash was growing up in West Virginia). With Russell Crowe's performance, you will not think that this is intentional by the actor, but will think that this is a natural result of the in-depth absorption of the character's personality.
For how to bring the audience into Nash's inner world, Director Howard brought a simple and clever idea just like itself. When asked why Nash believed in the fantasies that caused his illness, Nash said, "Those thoughts appear in my head in the same way as mathematics." Rather than commenting on the ingenious surprises made by Director Howard, I prefer to think that he has found a highly operable way to express the heart of the characters. (He also found some entertaining ways to express John Nash's mathematical insights: The theory that allowed Nash to win the Nobel Prize was shown in the student bar’s strategy of choosing a girlfriend.)
Nash's hallucinations become real day by day, and schizophrenia will not announce its arrival like the pain it brings. Mr. Howard slowly led us into Nash's hellish life without any prediction. The performance of this character seems to be at least close to the description of Mr. Nash in real life. Nash wrote in his autobiography published in 1994, "I began to rationally avoid the influence of some hallucinations, some of which have become part of my life environment."
Just like in real life, Nash in the movie is very trivial. The matter is impatient, and is more willing to study the "ruling power". The ruling power in "Beautiful Mind" is a familiar, but not repulsive, sentimental type. This movie is indeed and should be rejected rationally, but you will not reject it completely from your heart.
"Beautiful Mind" is PG-13 (watched under the guidance of parents). Contains some uncomfortable scenes and a small amount of sexual content.
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