Anatomy of a Scene: Nash cracks the code in ‘A Beautiful Mind’
A Beautiful Mind galvanised Russell Crowe’s career. He’d already turned heads with performances in 1999’s The Insider and 2001’s Gladiator, but this was the cherry on the cake, earning the Australian actor his third consecutive best actor Oscar nomination.
In 2002, he won a BAFTA for his portrayal of John Forbes Nash Jr, the mathematical genius and paranoid schizophrenic who founded Game Theory and won the Nobel prize for his efforts. A Beautiful Mind sought to capture the pulsating inner life of Nash Jr in a way that would allow the audience to sympathise with the calculating professor. Few scenes are as successful in this regard as the one in which Nash is invited to the Pentagon to crack an intercepted soviet code.
Before we get into what makes the code-cracking scene so effective, let’s retrace our steps. Inspired by the life of John Forbes Nash Jr, A Beautiful Mind explores the stunning rise (and eventual fall) of a mathematical genius. On discovering a new concept of governing dynamics after a night at the bar with his fellow Princeton University classmates, he is offered a post at MIT.
In 1953, Nash received an invitation to the Pentagon to help break encrypted telecommunications from Russia, which he was able to decipher using his mind. Unsatisfied with life at MIT, he decides to take up a recruitment offer from The United States Department of Defense’s William Parcher, who hands him an important classified assignment: to search for similar patterns in magazines and newspapers in order to stop a Soviet intelligence plot. Eventually, it transpired that Parcher was a figment of Nash’s imagination and that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
While A Beautiful Mind failed to touch on the homosexual episodes in Nash’s life and frequently portrays mental illness as being synonymous with genius, the 2002 picture succeeded in making an otherwise impenetrable character accessible to the common viewer. The code-breaking scene is a brilliant example. Nash walks into the Pentagon with a face like a fridge magnet.
As he is introduced to various military officials in a shadowy government building, his face remains fixed in the same dour expression. By this point, we understand that Nash is not an ordinary man. Yes, he’s an extraordinary mathematician, but he also behaves very unusually in front of people. Like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, he is faintly robotic, an unfeeling and austere analyst whose mind burns with an invisible fire.
We aren’t offered a peak beneath Nash’s cold exterior until he is placed in front of a screen of “preliminary data” and asked to “review” it. While he contemplates the information presented on the wall of numbers, the camera begins to circle around him, evoking his mental absorption and categorisation of the numerical data. Crowe highlights the character’s complete immersion by muttering to himself and having his eyes dart about the board. The character’s unity with the code, his superhuman ability to spot patterns where others see only chaos, is further emphasised by the character’s position and placement in the room. It is juxtaposed by the relaxed, communal positioning of the bemused military personnel, who look to one another for reassurance while Nash is entirely focused on the task at hand.
Slowly, patterns start to emerge: bold lines which glow like constellations in the night sky. The use of dissolve montage in this sequence does two things: it tells us how much time has passed (Nash remains in his fixed position while the personnel drink cups of coffee) and creates a powerful impression of sensory overload. Nash somehow manages to transform this into something constructive, comparing the various fragments of code before concluding that they represent latitudes and longitudes. He turns from the screen with a knowing look. “I need a map,” he says at last.