求一篇a beautiful mind观后感

Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a touching, emotionally charged film detailing

the life of a brilliant academic who suffers from schizophrenia. This

affliction slowly takes over his mind and we watch as his life crumbles

apart around him. He abandons his students, alienates his colleagues and

replaces his research with a fruitleand all-consuming obsession.

Eventually he is taken into hospital where he is forced, with the help

of electric-shock therapy and regular medication, to accept his

condition and attempt to repair the shattered fragments of his life.

He succeeds. Of course he succeeds, this is Hollywood and Hollywood

likes a happy ending. In this case the happy ending is that, as an old

man and after years of struggle, the poor academic is awarded the Nobel

Prize. One interesting point though; it's a true story and our hero is

none other than John Forbes Nash Jr.

As a young man, John Nash was a mathematical genius. In 1947 he went

to Princeton on a Carnegie Scholarship, and after three years had

produced a 27-page dissertation for his doctorate in which he greatly

expanded the field of Game Theory, transporting it from a position of

relative obscurity into one of almost universal relevance.

In the 1920s the father of Game Theory, Hungarian mathematician John

von Neumann, had shown that mathematical models could be used to explain

the behaviour of players in si-mp-le games. His work was limited in

scope however, and although interesting, it appeared to be of little

practical use.

Nash's dissertation expanded on von Neumann's work, showing how Game

Theory could explain complex as well as si-mp-le competitive behaviour.

It wasn't a comprehensive solution to all game situations, but it did

lay the foundations for the huge body of work on Game Theory which has

been produced since.

Unfortunately, very little of this comes acroin A Beautiful Mind

because the director (Ron Howard) seems more interested in ma-ki-ng a

film about a schizophrenic than a mathematician suffering from

schizophrenia. At the start of the film we are shown a Hollywood

template of a typically obsessive young academic, introverted, socially

inept, dismissive of his colleagues' work. If the notes we see Nash

scribbling on his windows were chemical formulae or rhyming couplets

rather than mathematical equations, the character would have seemed

equally plausible.

This is not to say that Russell Crowe, who plays Nash, does a bad

job. Indeed, he succeeds in giving his character a convincing

plausibility rarely seen in mainstream cinema these days, and he was

certainly a deserving Oscar nominee. It's just that we never see him

doing any maths apart from the occasional scribbling on windows.

And when his great breakthrough finally comes, Nash is not poring

over his books in the library or gazing fixedly at his glaequivalent of a

blackboard, he's in a bar, eyeing up a group of attractive young women.

How visually convenient.

But to be fair, this is a dramatisation based on Sylvia Nasar's

best-selling book, not a documentary. Its aim is to entertain, not to

enlighten, and it does this perfectly well. Russell Crowe produces

probably his best performance to date and is equally convincing as both

the awkward young genius and the tortured convalescent, struggling to

rebuild his marriage and career. Jennifer Connolly (who won the Oscar

for Best Supporting Actress) is excellent as Alicia, Nash's

long-suffering wife, and there are several strong performances from the

supporting cast, most notably Ed Harris as a mysterious character from

the military and Paul Bettany as Nash's Princeton roommate.

But Hollywood requires more from its films than a few good performances; it requires drama,