In “A Beautiful Mind” — a favorite of some Hollywood insiders for this year’s Best Picture Oscar — Russell Crowe plays John Forbes Nash Jr., a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who suffers a schizophrenic breakdown. The movie charts the rise, decline and redemption of his stormy career — though, as many writers have pointed out, that onscreen life has been altered and sanitized. Yet that air-brushed fictionalization seems less important than what Hollywood’s overwhelmingly favorable reception of “A Beautiful Mind” may signify.
The movie’s Nash is a wayward genius, a victim of madness. But he’s also a recognizable movie type: a classic alienated intellectual.
Nash isn’t the only alienated intellectual on screen lately. A whole flock of troubled geniuses, bookworms and psychological outsiders surfaced in 2001 and during the current Oscar season.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, alienated middle-class intellectuals were actually a familiar figure in the movies. Most of them, it’s true, came from foreign climes: the tortured, angst-ridden sufferers of Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman (“Persona,” “Hour of the Wolf”); the wandering, ennui-gripped intelligentsia of Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni (“La Notte”); the dreamy artists and filmmakers of Federico Fellini (“8 1/2,” “Juliet of the Spirits”). These films and characters became cultural touchstones of an era and they also helped inspire American examples: the verbose hell-raisers of John Cassavetes (“Faces,” “Husbands”), Stanley Kubrick’s freaks and outlaws (“Lolita”), and, most of all, the later New York comedies of Woody Allen, whose look, dialogue and characters were often directly inspired by Bergman or Fellini.
Few to carry on
That kind of figure — and that kind of film — mostly vanished from center stage in the ’80s and ’90s, with only Allen, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and even more marginalized filmmakers holding up the increasingly lonely banners of the old sophistication. They were the victims not just of a changing culture, but of the big studios’ blockbuster syndrome and increasing over-reliance on teen audiences and tastes. Now, it seems, they’ve returned — and “A Beautiful Mind” is only the crest of a small wave.
Here, in “Mind,” we see again the tormented outsider whose heightened vision dooms him or her to loneliness. In director Ron Howard’s film, Nash, tortured by delusions, becomes increasingly isolated from society until he battles back from the terrifying fantasies that plague him. The movie, an unabashed major studio product, shows Nash’s struggle with skill and real compassion.
Growing cast of characters
There are other current examples of the alienated intellectual. Consider Wes Anderson’s ensemble Manhattan comedy, “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and the film’s clan of offbeat intellectuals and fallen prodigies, led by a scapegrace father (Gene Hackman). Consider Altman’s “Gosford Park,” which shows one alienated artist, playwright-actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), in a household of jaded British aristocrats. Consider outlaw playwright Miguel Pinero, played by Benjamin Bratt in “Pinero,” or the late, highly esteemed British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, whom we see in the soon-to-be released “Iris” in the bloom of brilliant youth (played by Kate Winslet) and later in old age (played by Judi Dench) succumbing to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Consider, on a lower level, the blacklist-threatened screenwriter stricken with amnesia, played by Jim Carrey in Frank Darabont’s Capraesque “The Majestic.” Or all those babbling philosophical ruminators in Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life.” Or, from a slightly different angle, the brainy, troubled, ultra-alienated outsiders in four of this year’s distinctive noir thrillers: “Memento” (Guy Pearce’s amnesiac), “Mulholland Drive” (Naomi Watts as the actress living in a nightmare), “Vanilla Sky” (Tom Cruise as the book publisher who plunges into tragedy and dreams), and “In the Bedroom” (Tom Wilkinson as the affluent doctor coping with the terrible aftermath of his son’s murder).
All this is a real change from the teen-centered, action-oriented heroes Hollywood has heavily promoted since the ’80s — the Schwarzeneggers, Stallones and Willises, monosyllabic dudes who come through in the crunch. It’s also a switch from the more upbeat, socially deft, charming heroes played by actors such as Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Hugh Grant or Cruise.
Why the change? To some extent, it’s cultural: Better education has been a major slogan for the last two U.S. Presidents, bringing renewed media and cultural prominence to the whole idea of intellectual achievement. The glut of cable TV and the Internet has created an information explosion, exposing more people to more ideas. But to a large extent, it may be a case of pressure from below.
For years, foreign films and American indies have been the escape hatch for that other, older type of picture. Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 “sex, lies & videotape,” long considered the paradigmatic “Sundance Festival” film, is also a classic alienated intellectual piece — with James Spader as the brainy dropout living via videotape in a world he’s largely escaped. The Sundance influence, the cachet of the independent film, even the examples of more experimental or adventurous films made for TV, like this year’s “Anne Frank,” have affected the mainstream.
It’s a cinematic trend that so far is small. But it has roots. Back in the ’30s, Hollywood was capable of making heroes of scientist Louis Pasteur and novelist Emile Zola. Biographies of these intellectual heroes and heroines — most of them much more inaccurate than “A Beautiful Mind” — appeared regularly in Hollywood’s Golden Age, among the studio “prestige” products that a later school of movie-centered critics would grow to scorn.Then came the 1960s and the early ’70s, when films from the Bergmans, Antonionis, Fellinis and Truffauts suddenly became all the rage and hugely influenced the younger generation of American moviemakers. It’s hard to believe now, but in 1962, John Huston made a bio-drama on Sigmund Freud, starring Montgomery Clift, largely scripted (uncredited) by the renowned French philosopher-novelist Jean-Paul Sartre. In the ’60s and ’70s — which a lot of critics now consider a real Golden Age of American movies — many of these filmmakers explored alienated, smart, misunderstood protagonists, with Allen’s post-“Annie Hall” movies only the most obvious examples.
The blockbuster brigade
After the huge success of 1975’s “Jaws” and 1977’s “Star Wars,” though, the studios embarked on their blockbuster odyssey. Since then, American movies have celebrated cops and soldiers or endlessly examined teenage sex and athletes and celebrities, and they’ve tended to ignore, except in rare cases, people who live the world of the mind. Lower and medium budget independent movies may pull out an intellectual or two — usually fresh out of college, from an affluent background and living somewhere in Manhattan. But these were essentially depictions of the filmmakers and writers themselves and of their milieu.
Now comes “A Beautiful Mind,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Pinero,” “Iris” and a dozen others. One of the things that’s most impressive about Crowe’s performance in “Mind” — and some by the other actors in these films — is the uncondescending and dedicated way they dig into these characters. A math genius like Forbes or a writer/philosopher like Murdoch can be heroic and it’s good to see them treated that way. It’s a healthy trend in a society that too often elevates its government leaders, athletes and financial winners (and its movie stars) and deprecates its great intellects.
Compared with the ’60s masterpieces of Bergman, Antonioni and Fellini, the new wave of alienated intellectual films don’t yet measure up. They’re not great films, with the exception, perhaps, of some of the new film noirs (“In the Bedroom” and “Mulholland Drive”). But perhaps one of the reasons we can and do over-criticize them — arguing so passionately about the “veracity” of “A Beautiful Mind” — is that these films cover areas of life, finally, which writers can know firsthand.
Refreshing `trend’
I’m not so naive that I believe this return to a few films about the intellectual life is a wholly laudable trend or even that it will last, given our new consciousness of war.
But, speaking as an old bookworm, it’s heartening to see the movies once again trying to show us characters who read widely, talk well and think deeply — however alienated they may feel inside.
