A Beautiful Mind


         When I was a little boy I was told by my mother that I was a genius, shown through IQ tests and my quick ability to learn new things.   I read at a fourth grade level at the time of my entrance into public school.  I had an innocent but compulsive desire to know how things worked and to solve puzzles, breaking down everything physically and mentally.
          Once I got to high school, though, I didn’t believe I showed any signs of mental superiority.  I wasn’t anything special as far as grades or SATs or talent were concerned.  My mother would still tell me that I was a genius, however, despite my decreasing memory and understanding of things.  On one hand, I completely dismissed her statements regarding my potential because they only made me disappointed in my actuality.   On the other hand, I developed delusions of grandeur blaming genius for my exhausting brain patterns, my unsociability and cynicism, and my increasing symptoms of insanity.   
           Ron Howard’s new film, “A Beautiful Mind” is about a real genius named John Nash.  The biographical film tells of Nash’s life from graduate school at Princeton in 1932 up to the beginning of his residence there 8 years ago.  Within those sixty years we see his struggle for superiority and his struggle with schizophrenia while working on original ideas in economics, his top secret code breaking for the government and his resulting shaky marriage. 
           I found myself embracing and fearing Ron Howard’s new film “A Beautiful Mind” just as I did  “Catcher in the Rye” and “Good Will Hunting”.   There was a sense of relation not felt as strongly since the film “Little Man Tate”.  Such connection with characters can blur my ability to rate a movie on cinematic levels because I feel much less objective.   I laughed.  I cried.   I felt moved on many levels, but I couldn’t believe that this film was more than just pretty good.  There are some “Sixth Sense” type surprises and then there are the  familiar grounds of the biopics genre where we see a zoo-like exhibition and are left with nothing more than to say we saw it and it was interesting. 
           Then there is the performance by Russell Crowe as Nash which is downright brilliant.  He plays a precise weave between straight subtlety and raving paranoia without going over the top the way Geoffrey Rush does in the comparable movie “Shine”.  Like that of his acting in “The Insider”, I lost my ability to believe I was watching Russell Crowe, something not found with his Oscar winning role in “Gladiator”.  I cannot  call it genius, though, because I have yet to be ushered in that direction.   Once he does crazy things like bang his head to quiet his madness, something shared by Nash and myself, I can use the word more fittingly.
           “A Beautiful Mind” might be a dangerous film for me.  It almost makes me wish that I was schizophrenic so that I might be more understood as a genius, seeing as how I have not found my true talents or original ideas the way John Nash finds them in the film.  He may share my discomfort in life though on a much higher scale, but at least he won the Nobel Prize and had a film made about himself.
           My brother once said, “the problem with being superior is that nobody believes you.”  This has been the case with many geniuses throughout time, persecuted until their original ideas are accepted.  For some, this never is achieved in their own lifetime.  Luckily for John Nash it was.  I once said, “it is hard being insane, but that is something I have to accept with the gift of genius.”   To me, being insane is just being out of step with the world.   Unfortunately for John Nash it is being a freak on display.