In a rare move on my part, I went to see this movie the other day with an area, (sorta), list member. I have a close friend who suffers from the same problem, so the story line had a great deal of personal content for me.
Russell Crowe's acting was wonderful. The tics, the speech patterns, the mannerisms; these were all perfect. Sadly, it was great acting within a highly sanitized version of Nash's life. It was like a Beef Wellington with a superb piece filet mignon wrapped in a BisQuick crust. Or a great Stilton served on Wonder Bread. Or a gruyere cheese omelet made with canned spinach. I could go on but my stomach rumblings will wake the household and the analogies have more of a bearing on my New Year's diet than the movie I'm trying to write about! I thought that the movie plodded in the first half, although there were some marvelous camera techniques by Ron Howard to depict Nash's genius. I didn't think that Howard adequately made us feel the spark and bond between the Mr. and Mrs. and past that, the true trials of maintaining a relationship when one partner suffers from a mental illness stayed unexplored. Still, I was struck by how Howard portrayed the manifestation of Nash's growing schizophrenia. I've always been a fan or at least sympathetic to alternate realities and you have to wonder at the medical world's instant leap to squash 'em and drug 'em up. And if that fails, zap the heck outta them. And when the meds kick in, the alternative realities, (aka hallucinations), go packing and the artist stops creating. What happens next beyond getting scruffy and watching your genius move farther and farther out of reach? I think that this film does not begin to catch the true pain and horror of paranoid schizophrenia. Nash comes off as an arrogant, albeit lovable quirky kinda guy with a penchant for newsprint wallpaper and string art. It doesn't begin to capture the mean and vicious persona that emerges when paranoid schizophrenia is in full bloom. The family always has a home to live in, Mrs. Nash always has a funky new pair of espadrilles to wear and his colleagues just accept him for being a bit odd. Still, even with these shortcomings, it's a powerful film. A day later and I'm still thinking a lot about art and genius and what makes some of us go tick..tock and others of us go ...ockt itck. MG
