Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste
Russell Crowe puts the brains and brawn into "A Beautiful Mind,"
Ron Howard's bio of genius and mental illness.
A Beautiful Mind is about a man so disconnected from of
everything outside of his own perceptions that he easily falls prey when his
mind and perceptions begin to conjure up things to fill in the balance. It is
based on the true story of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a math professor at Princeton
University whose game theory studies revolutionized the field of economics and
would earn him the Nobel Prize after a forty-year fight with schizophrenia.
The film is a testimonial to how a movie can be miss-marketed
when other needs have to be served. Universal Pictures has unwisely pushed it as
a thriller- complete with shadowy men in fedoras and long overcoats, talk of
hidden codes and international conspiracies. However, anyone familiar with the
life of Nash will know (since it is public domain knowledge I really don’t
consider the following a spoiler, but so I don’t wake up with angry emails
tomorrow: SPOILER ALERT!) that these were elements of paranoid delusions that
nearly cost him his career and his marriage. Don’t ever underestimate the
timidity of studios during a holiday crunch time to lace anything coming out of
its presses with a hint of danger and scandal that isn’t there.
A Beautiful Mind gets its highest marks with its acting and a
slightly lower, but still respectable, score for actual storytelling. Put this
alongside The Insider as one of Russell Crowe’s most absorbing performances as
he transforms himself into an unsure man of great feeling and little way to
express it, undergoing decades of trauma and hurt. It is ironic that Crowe’s
only Oscar win, for Gladiator, is bookend-ed by a performance he was stiffed for
and another that he will likely be overlooked for. It is as if filmgoers are
only happy if the man is running very sharp weapons through people. Jennifer
Connelly, coming off a devastatingly precise performance (which she was also
ignored for) in Requiem for a Dream, plays Nash’s long-suffering wife with
buckets full of damaged looks and gilded patience.
The film begins with Nash as a newcomer at Princeton
University in pursuit of his “one original idea.” After publishing his
groundbreaking paper, he his placed at a defense department think tank where his
work in Cold War code breaking begins to tug on his paranoid strings. Along the
way, certain parts of Nash’s life are skipped- his fathering a child out of
wedlock, for example. Nevertheless, A Beautiful Life comes off as richer and
more coherent than Ali did, another movie about a gifted man with anti-social
tendencies.
Ron Howard, a director who has only scored any significant
degree of dramatic challenge with Ransom, manages to put some breaks on his
style-over-substance persona. Probably one of the film’s biggest speed bumps is
the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, who has yet to be forgiven for subjecting me
to his jokey, one-note scripts for Batman & Robin and Lost in Space. Although
his work is more solid here, it still suffers from a minor case of smart
aleck-ness that disrupts the flow of the movie. In one scene in the beginning
Nash is prompted to court an attractive girl in a Princeton bar, and ends up
slapped in the face when his unsociable directness leads him to ask if they can
forgo the platonic rituals and just get to the sex. This is one of the few
plastic moments of the film- a flippant screenwriter’s idea of how a secluded
know-it-all acts that sacrifices any real, or keen, observation.
A Beautiful Life is already being groomed for best picture
status and I wonder how John Nash would find the irony of that- the movie is
hardly an “original idea” itself. Count on it getting overwhelmed by the expanse
of Lord of the Rings or the in-your-face-ness of Black Hawk Down. But on its
own, the movie is a keeper- and a talented actor’s lock box of another road- and
mind- traveled. B+