The Beautiful Mind / GMA: Cluttered mind?

There’s no doubt any good actor casts a spell on the audience. But a great actor goes beyond this spell to imprison you in a cage because he is a god and can render you motionless and breathless behind bars. Maybe that is too high a pedestal for Russell Crowe and then again maybe not. But you had to see him twice to detect his theatrical or cinematic genius. For in art and in literature, as it is, yes, in sports, it’s the difference that counts. At the drop of any Gallic metaphor, the French always exclaim: "Vive la difference!" So it is. So it shall always be.

In The Gladiator, Russell Crowe was all hunk. He was all the raw rippling power of a professional warrior, all that a man can show before his Creator that he fears neither man nor beast. That the physical in him is just as divine and talented as the brain in him. The gladiator is ready to die anytime, yield his life for the greater glory of human courage in battle. In The Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe was the unlikely worm that wriggled out of the apple. A fairy godmother perhaps tapped this worm and – lo and behold! – Crowe as John Nash was a mathematical genius trapped in the wild and whirling fastnesses of schizophrenia.

The gladiator had completely disappeared.

Gone was the Maximus who said before mortal combat "Te moritori salutamus" (We who are about to die salute Thee) after bowing to the Emperor in the palisaded Colosseum of ancient Rome. The face, the features of Maximus were all grit and flashing steel, the eyes fierce and resolute, the armored body swaggering on the blade of his broadsword. As he fought and killed, the throngs hailed him. They roared out his name as though Maximus’ superb gladiatorial skills had just been delivered by winged angels for the crowd’s delectation.

Every movement, every gesture, every word seemed to have come from the Roman caverns for animals, where only the most worthy of beasts could survive.

There was nothing of the child, the old man, the onset of age, the vagaries of trapped emotion, the eccentricities of a wild and often insane imagination, the fear, the haunted eyes, a throat gone berserk and after the throat the mind, then the whole body of John Nash strapped into a strait-jacket. How could it ever happen to a man with a mind that gentle, that beautiful, that talented, that week after week during a period he had to undergo electric shock, an extreme treatment reserved by medical science at that time only for the insane? But there he was, screaming, tossing, and jerking, a man possessed by the Furies, helpless against an intellect that embodied genius and insanity at the same time. And yet at bottom, the mind remained beautiful.

Is it correct to say that madness is the flipside of genius?

The actor or actress is really great who does not say anything during a scene. It is the face that talks, that flickers, that registers emotions of almost every shade, as of a tree lashed by cross-winds or a ship stricken by a storm. Ethel Barrymore exaggerated when she said: "For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros." Jennifer Connelly had little of these as she enacted the role of Alicia, the wife of John Nash. But she has been nominated for the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. She was, like Russell Crowe, a great actress in levitation, moments of sheer silent suspense, a martyr certainly who could suffer John Nash in all his moods. But Alicia twisted in great pain just the same. Nevertheless, she loved her husband so terribly she could free herself – even when nailed – from the cross.

I found myself in tears when towards the end, John Nash delivered his response in that great memorial hall of Stockholm after being awarded the Nobel Prize for economics.

The hair had turned grey. Folds of skin began to quiver from his face. Ridges had screwed themselves like narrow river banks into what once looked like a baby face of Nash when he was a young student at Princeton. The voice had now the pitch of old man who had forded so many swollen emotional rivers and lived to tell the tale. And he said what saints and holy men had said long before him. And will say long after him. But Nash said it with great emotion. And it was that what really mattered was not the logic of math or calculus but the deathless logic of love. Always the Epiphany.

It was touching, it was poignant. It was as poignant as the time Alicia knelt before John Nash, now recovering from a crazy streak. She held her husband’s hand and placed it tenderly, alternately on her face, her breast and her heart. "This is real," she repeated thrice, slowly and plaintively, to demonstrate that in an unreal, crazy, demented, upside down world such as what Nash was suffering, it was the real things that really mattered. And you could touch them. And feel them. They were beautiful.

Sylvia Nasar, who wrote her biography of John Nash in 1998, denies in a Los Angeles Times article that he was ever a gay or adulterer. The tabloids and even the mainstream newspapers hinted as such rather wickedly. The New York Times even wrote they were separated for nearly 40 years. Ms. Nasar admitted that they had divorced but by the time they remarried last June, "they had been living together for 30 years, many of which were years of poverty and illness."

I am a sucker for a good story, a great movie, and acting that takes my shoelaces away. There is all the indication that Russell Crowe might win the Oscar for the Best Actor award. This would be back-to-back for last year he won the same award for The Gladiator. This is also not to mention the same chances of The Beautiful Mind bagging the Best Movie honors. Like everybody else reading this column, I’ll be strapped to my easy chair Sunday watching the Oscar ceremony (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar Awards).

I’ll be rooting for Russell Crowe, of course, and The Beautiful Mind. I owe them. They have extricated me from the sleaze and stink of events in the Philippines, if only for the nonce. The respite has enabled me to write this piece which I enjoyed immensely. Thank God for little favors.

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I must warn President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to mind her language and behave like the president of the Republic that she should be. She was just quoted as saying that those protesting the arrival of US troops here "are the same anti-American groups that objected to the VFA. These are people who are always criticizing the Balikatan, the VFA, which the Supreme Court has upheld as constitutional. These are the anti-Americans and we have to live with that."

Wrong. These are freedom-loving Filipinos, Mrs. President, and you have to live with that.

Let’s not pour the vial of anti-American venom into an issue that may eventually determine whether we Filipinos live or die as a republic. I, for instance, am not anti-American at all. A great many of my relatives reside in North America. And the American way of life within its borders continues to astound me, multi-cultured as it is, protean, open to all racial minorities, its domestic bedrock a real and working democracy. But we Filipinos must learn to differentiate between America as a nation nestled 15,000 miles away and America as a superpower seeking to blanket the world with its imperial might.

The two are not the same. As I have heard many political scientists observe: American democracy and American morality stop at its national borders. Beyond these borders, it’s catch-as-catch-can. Beyond these borders, America will seek to bend every nation to its will, particularly in its open-ended war against "international terror". Beyond these borders, America and China are the two top gladiators on the geo-political arena, circling each other for the ultimate prize in the 21st century: Who will emerge as the unrivalled hegemon of the Asia-Pacific region?

Do not tell me, Mrs. President, that the Americans are simply here to obliterate the Abu Sayyaf. That’s sheer and arrant nonsense. Why don’t you have the guts to tell us the truth? That the Yankees are here to replant their flag in Asia as the world’s military colossus. Why the Philippines? Because the archipelago and its surrounding waterways, seas and oceans – so close to and even abutting on China – are ideal for projecting American military power in the continent. Against China, of course. Against the "Axis of Evil" comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Against the Islamic resurgence which Harvard professor emeritus Stanley Huntington claims is culturally pointed at the heart of America.

My concern is that in the long haul, the Philippines will be back, if it’s not already, to the role of Little Brown Brother, a modern Gunga Din marching to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Hey Joe, got chocolate?

I’ll have a lot more to say about this issue, Mrs. President.