A Beautiful Mind Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)January 2nd, 2002
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
PG-13 124 minutes
Directed by Ron Howard
WHERE, WHEN
Now playing at the UA DeVargas
Movies about living people are a tricky business. John Nash, a Nobel Prize winning mathematician/economist, still teaches at Princeton and, according to a note at the end, still walks to work every day – not far, one hopes, considering the shuffling gait with which Russell Crowe finishes this movie. At Princeton, and among the math community where Dr. Nash is known, the impact of Ron Howard’s moving and slightly fantastic biography will have a particularly personal impact. For the rest of us, farther out along the chain of ripples, the impact is still powerful, uplifting, and entertaining into the bargain.
It’s a story of genius and a story of madness, two tales which it is not unheard of to find collected in the same anthology. It begins with John Nash as a graduate student at Princeton, a young man without much in the way of social skills but not without a certain impish humor. He becomes friends with his roommate, Charles Herman (Paul Bettany, Chaucer in "A Knight's Tale"), who is everything he is not – dashing and charismatic. Nash doesn’t go to classes (“They dull the mind”), but spends his days scribbling calculations on his dormitory window in search of a breakthrough idea.
Finally it comes. Sitting in a bar with some friends, he formulates a theory on how best to pick up a group of girls, and in a eureka! moment hits upon his famous Nash Equilibrium, standing Adam Smith’s theory of competition on its ear and earning him the coveted appointment at MIT’s Wheeler Lab. One might doubt that this epochal discovery really came to pass in such a cinema-friendly way, but this is, after all, a movie, and the moment is fun.
Director Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman unspool the story of Nash’s descent into walking schizophrenia with a fascinating device, and one about which it is better not to know too much going in or it will spoil the fun. Suffice it to say, as a character played by Christopher Plummer does late in the movie, that “the nightmare of schizophrenia is not knowing what’s true and what isn’t.”
The remarkable Australian actor Russell Crowe delivers the performance of what has already been quite a career (“The Insider”, “L.A. Confidential”). From downy-cheeked grad student to shuffling old Nobel Laureate, he builds his character on a patchwork of details – a soft West Virginia drawl, a numb-lipped smile, an idiosyncratic gait – that tell us exactly who he is without ever nudging us in the ribs. He gets lovely help from Jennifer Connelly as his wife Alicia, although Connelly gets the Elizabeth-Taylor-in-Giant makeup treatment to indicate her 40 years of aging at the end. Crowe, for that matter, looks a bit older than his 66 years ought to warrant at the Nobel ceremony, but schizophrenia may do that to a guy. In addition to Plummer and Bettany, there is first rate support from Ed Harris as a government agent, Josh Lucas as a grad school rival, and Austin Pendleton as the man sent by the Nobel committee to check on Nash’s sanity bona fides.
Ron Howard as a director is no stranger to sentiment, and there’s some of that here, but he doesn’t drown you in it. There are flaws to be found in the movie, but overall it’s so satisfying that you can just do what Nash learns to do with his delusions: pretend they’re not there.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
