Review:

** (out of ****)

Starring:

Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Vivien Cardone, Judd Hirsch, Josh Lucas, Anthony Rapp, Christopher Plummer

Director:

Ron Howard

Screenplay:

Akiva Goldsman (Book by Sylvia Nasar)

Length:

135 min.

MPAA Rating:

PG-13 (For intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence)

When you look at the genius in the world, you can understand how it can be exploited and ridiculed by the masses. A Beautiful Mind is a touching, yet disturbing film about one brilliant mathematician who fosters changes in the world and discovers them in himself.

Russell Crowe plays tortured mathematician John Nash, a brilliant man whose life's devotion is to discover new mathematical theorems based on everyday experiences. He watches pigeons fight over food, trying to establish a pattern; he examines football players and their methods attempting to find a common thread; and eventually watches men pursue women and uncovers how a "divide and concur" approach can breed success.

All of these methodologies are developed in college, after which, he takes a job with a prestigious scientific institution where he is approached by a military agent, William Parcher (Ed Harris). Parcher enlists his services to help break enemy codes. Nash knows and understands he must keep this job a secret or be turned over to the Soviets.

When he begins to believe that his life is endanger, his erratic and suspicious behavior draw the attention of his family and colleagues who believe that he is crazy, seeing phantoms and feeling that everyone is out to get him.

A Beautiful Mind takes us through the disturbed and innocent mind of a brilliant individual. It examines human reaction to the unknown and the undesired. Nash takes steps forward and back throughout his career, never fully understanding why everyone sees him differently. Crowe does decently well with the character giving him all the needed depth and compassion that Akiva Goldsman’s script denies him. We don’t have a sense of who Nash is as a person without Crowe’s performance.

It is that element of the screenplay that causes the film to suffer. Lacking great dialogue and significantly altering the facts of the real life person. It is based on the true story of John Nash a man who heard hundreds of voices. In A Beautiful Mind, those voices are personified to make it easier on a broader audience; However, had Goldsman and director Ron Howard thought about their subject and the power and possibilities of the story, a more invigorating tale could have been told with Nash hearing said voices. The choice to shoot these voices as flesh-and-blood people does make the desired goals of the screenplay more palatable to the masses but denies a better director and screenwriter the opportunity to make a more intriguing and visually artistic picture.

Aside from Crowe’s worthy performance, Harris and Paul Bettany (as Nash’s friend and college roommate) are all perfunctory. Harris has long been an unheralded presence on the screen. His work in films like The Truman Show and The Hours often being usurped by flashier roles, does little to support or hinder his career. Bettany gives the kind of performance that you expect from an actor of his talents and doesn’t stretch himself as an actor.

Lending satisfactory support as Nash’s wife Alicia is Labyrinth alum Jennifer Connelly. Her career-high work in Requiem for a Dream stands so far above anything else she’s done that Connelly seems to comfortable in her performance. She walks through her performances like many actresses would and provides nothing exceptional to the role.

There is an underlying theme that feels as if it was neglected and only lightly touched upon. It’s about our ability to question what is real and what is not. Could the world around us be an invention of our own imagination? Is our best friend really just a figment of thought? Will something cease to exist just because we stop believing it’s real? Howard and Goldsman present a convincing case with their double twist for this argument but is that really their intention or are we just developing it from our own imagination? We cannot really answer that question for A Beautiful Mind is paint-by-numbers filmmaking at its best. Everything has a purpose. Everything has a place. Nothing is out of the ordinary; sub-, extra- or otherwise.

-Wesley Lovell (originally written: December 21, 2001; edited and corrected: December 26, 2006)