Not so beautiful

After reading Sylvia Nazar's A Beautiful Mind recently, I thought it would be good to catch up with the film version, which I missed at the cinema.

Oh dear. The film never really gets beneath the skin of its subject. There is no very convincing account of how brilliant he is or why it's important when he discovers something new in game theory, so that you don't know why anybody should care when he goes mad, or understand why he should get a Nobel prize. This is a pity, because I found the background about Princeton in that era to be one of the most interesting aspects of the book. Princeton in the late 40s was like Paris for artists in 1900. I was rather hoping the film might show the occasion when Nash met Einstein, the result being "You should learn more physics, young man". Somewhat peripheral perhaps, but it would have been a scene that told us a lot about the brashness of Nash, the milieu in which he found himself, and the fact that he was treated seriously.

I suppose the main idea of the film was to show Nash's delusions as real, and I think this aspect works somewhat better than the rest. Ultimately though, it's an excuse to insert some bits of a crappy espionage thriller into a film about a mathematician's struggle with mental illness. It distracts from the main point.

The ending is particularly unsatisfactory. The implication is that he just hung about the library being eccentric but basically likeable until one day he was offered the Nobel prize. In fact, his behaviour was probably a good deal more odd and hard to deal with, and he actually got better after about 1990-a controvertial statement, since you aren't supposed to recover from schizophrenia. The fact that his son also had schizophrenia was excised, as was his divorce from Alicia, and his other illegitimate child.

I wonder what the Mike Leigh version would have been like?