A Beautiful Mind
Universal/DreamWorks, 2001
Directed by Ron Howard

$$$1/2

If you're looking to compete for Academy Awards, it's no secret that one sure fire way is to make a movie about a brilliant person who struggles to overcome a physical/mental disorder. The makers of Rain Man, My Left Foot and Shine, just to name a few, have all spent quality time with Oscar. It's a safe bet that a movie about a blind, wheelchair bound, autistic genius would win truckloads of trophies.

Instead, Ron Howard has settled for making a movie about a genius who's a paranoid schizophrenic. A Beautiful Mind chronicles the (mostly) true story of Nobel Prize Winning Mathematician John Forbes Nash, played by Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe, trying his best to appear quirky and awkward. This must surely be a challenge for someone as naturally charismatic as Crowe. Heck, his Australian accent alone gives him more personality than most of us guys could ever dream of having. So, it's no surprise the accent is the first to go.

The West Virginia drawl he deftly adopts instantly knocks him down to more routine levels on the charisma scale (Crowe has already demonstrated his talent at American dialects in The Insider and L.A. Confidential). However, his speech here is a little reminiscent of a certain ping-pong playing cross-country runner played by Tom Hanks. At certain times, you half expect Nash to start talking about shrimp recipes and boxes of chocolate. (I also wouldn't be surprised if Crowe pulled a Hanks and won back-to-back Best Actor Oscars.)

The little ticks that Crowe gives the character sometimes seem forced. For the most part though, he is transformed. He does a fine job of making us believe he is a man who's being tortured by his own mind.

At Princeton, Nash doesn't bother with classes. Instead, he spends his time in the library, scribbling formulas on the windows -- formulas, it turns out, that lead to the discovery of a ground breaking economic theory.

He quickly moves on to teach and do research at M.I.T. There, he falls in love with -- and later marries -- one of his students, and does occasional work for the Department of Defense, cracking code. But as this work intensifies, his life is what ends up cracking.

The first part of the movie is shown through Nash's perspective. Director Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsmith do an excellent job of showing his mind at work. Numbers and letters twinkle, leap through the air and dance around. We get a hint of what it must be like to see the patterns in the chaos. But when the perspective changes, we learn that everything is not as it seems. The world does not really exist as Nash sees it. And that's when his madness is revealed -- not just revealed, but understood. First, Howard shows us what it feels like to be brilliant, then he shows us what it feels like to be crazy.

Putting up with Nash though all of this is his wife, Alicia, played by a shockingly thin Jennifer Connelly. Connelly used to be one of the most beautiful and voluptuous actresses in Hollywood, but she seems to have been starving herself lately. Her performance, though, is top notch, and is sure to garner some Academy recognition. Ed Harris also does his usual outstanding job in a supporting role, playing one of his specialties -- the shadowy creep in a dark suit.

A Beautiful Mind is built around an irony of tragic proportions: Nash has a mind capable of solving any problem, but when the problem is his mind, the challenge becomes even greater. It's a challenge that ends up taking decades. In the later years, Crowe wears some astonishing old age make-up. I'll go out on a limb and say Greg Cannom's work in this department is the most realistic ever put on film. Russell Crowe no longer has to wonder what he'll look like when he gets older -- his future is on display in the last reel.

In the end, the film is a poignant story of perseverance, a story that shows that love is often best displayed through almost unimaginable devotion.
(c) Copyright 2002