A Beautiful Mind Review
by Eugene Novikov (lordeugene_98 AT yahoo DOT com)February 7th, 2002
A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com
"...but an even greater gift is to have a beautiful mind."
Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connely, Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer, Paul Bettany. Directed by Ron Howard. Rated PG-13.
A Beautiful Mind, a long, eventful, simplistic biopic of troubled mathematician John Forbes Nash, purports to make schizophrenia accessable to us "sane people." It does so by cheapening the tragic disease to the point where an uneducated viewer might think its effects to be nothing more than occasional hallucinations. The film is bolstered by an impressive performance by Russell Crowe -- although the Golden Globe he just received for it should have gone elsewhere -- but it's really not the elaborate portrait screenwriter Akiva Goldsman was hoping to craft. I don't know much about Nash, but I get the feeling that he deserved better. Even the title is clumsy, like a bad Doogie Howser season finale.
The film opens with Nash's arrival at Princeton University as a young prodigy who joins a group of similarly brilliant, more pragmatic students all anxious to write the next big paper, make the next earth-shattering discovery in the field of mathematics. Nash, with his unseemly stutter and anti-social habits -- he spends his free time writing equations on his dorm windows -- make him the brunt of Princeton's jokes; finally, he goes into reclusion and comes out with a brilliant thesis on economic theory, a groundbreaking paper that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize in economics.
Things are never that simple in movies and of course Nash, now a calculus professor at Princeton, soon falls into a delusional world of his own creation, in which he is hired by a shady Defense Department agent (Ed Harris) to seek out secret messages in mainstream media that communists are inserting to mobilize their US operations. Nash begins to spend his waking hours combing through Life and Time magazines, making vague, undecipherable connections between letters and numbers supposedly embedded in the text. It isn't too long before he is institutionalized by a psychologist who claims to know what he is going through. His girlfriend Alicia (Jennifer Connely) is chagrined and frustrated, and the movie makes a big deal about the fact that she remains faithful, as if that were something extraordinary for people who are in love (granted, though, a lesser movie might have inserted a big scene where Alicia decides that she "needs to see other people").
I simply didn't buy A Beautiful Mind as a character study. I couldn't find a genuine small moment anywhere in the vicinity; every event the film chronicles is Big and Significant, grandiose in a story-of-his-life checklist sort of way, and neither John nor Alicia become people we care about. Everything is patly wrapped up in the worst of biopic conventions, the Big Speech, in which Nash helpfully expounds on his life, his mind and his relationships. Thanks.
Curiously, Howard chose to rationalize Nash's thought process, something that cannot always be done with ordinary people, never mind a mathematical genius and a schizophrenic to boot. A strange bar scene in which Nash and his friends ponder how to best seduce a group of women apparently provides the inspiration for his entire economic theory; I don't know how true this factoid is, but I can venture a guess. Worse, his portrayal of Nash's ailment is so level-headed that we are fooled for a while into believing that it's real: a nice thematic trick, to be sure -- we are fooled much like Nash is fooled -- but would a schizophrenic's fantasies really be so flat and obvious?
I think that the near-universal acclaim that A Beautiful Mind has received is forcing me to dwell on its flaws despite the fact that its virtues probably make it worth seeing. It is a well-acted film, no doubt, with both Crowe and Connely turning in performances that convince you even when Goldsman's script does not. The score by James Horner is surprisingly good -- for James Horner -- and Ron Howard knows how to make a solid, entertaining Hollywood movie. But neither he nor Goldsman, the author of dubious blockbusters like Batman & Robin, Practical Magic and Lost on Space (the latter being one of the worst films I have ever seen), can take the material a step further. Howard was on a roll with the one-two punch of Apollo 13 and Ransom in the mid-90's, and I even liked How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but A Beautiful Mind is neither aesthetically pleasing -- witness the horrendous make-up Crowe has to wear in the final scenes -- nor intelligent.
Grade: B-
Up Next: The Royal Tenenbaums
©2001 Eugene Novikov
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