Double Feature

January 2017 - This month marks 20 years since I joined Mensa. To mark my Mensaversary, here are reviews of two excellent films about people who were way smarter than me.

A Beautiful Mind from 2001 tells the story of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash. Russell Crowe earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in the title role. Jennifer Connelly won an Oscar for her portrayal of his wife. Ron Howard took home a statue for best director, and the PG-13 movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The movie follows Nash from his days as a graduate student at Princeton to his receiving the Nobel Prize some 50 years later. At Princeton, Nash never goes to class but manages to come up with a totally revolutionary mathematical theory. It earns him a spot at Wheeler Labs on the campus of MIT. It's there that Nash falls for one of his students. Saying any more would ruin the surprise, which comes about an hour into the movie.

Overall review: Loved it! Totally fascinating and engrossing. I've read that the film ignores or glosses over some of the less noble aspects of Nash's life. Maybe so, but don't let the facts get in the way of a great movie.

The facts also seem to be fudged, at least a little bit, in The Imitation Game, another excellent film based on the life of a mathematician. Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley received Oscar nominations for their performances in this PG-13 movie from 2014. The movie was also up for Best Picture, and it did win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, a mathematical genius who also happens to be gay. In 1939, he's recruited by Britain's super-secret spy agency MI6 to join a super-secret team at Bletchley Park, outside London. Their mission is to crack the codes being used by the German Navy during World War II. The Brits managed to get their hands on a German Enigma machine, which can decode the messages. The problem is that the Germans change the key every day and the possible combinations number in the hundreds of millions.

Turing's idea is to build a machine that can sort through all those combinations quickly. Other members of his team think he's crazy until he gets support from Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He also gets help – and friendship – from Joan Clarke, a woman who's a math genius in her own right. Still, despite all this brain power, it takes a comment made by a woman in a pub to give Turing the clue he needs to solve the mystery of Enigma.

Overall review: Loved it! This is a war movie with battle scenes that take place in offices and huts, police interview rooms and apartments. The tension builds as Turing and his team race to crack Enigma. Once they do, there's more tension as they realize that their discovery itself must be kept secret. The other enigma here is Turing himself as he struggles to deal with his homosexuality during a very unaccepting time. The film moves quickly and does not feel as long as its 1:54 running time.