A Beautiful Mind (2001)
Grade: C
Cast: Russel Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, and Christopher Plummer
Director: Ron Howard
Rated PG-13 for intense thematic material, a scene of sexuality, and a scene of violence

"A Beautiful Mind" should have been the personal and deeply moving story of a schizophrenic man that it's not. The film does not live up to it's 2001 Best Picture or Best Director Oscar. It's a sloppy film that gives us no insight into the mind of a man that we are supposed to care about. As viewers, we should watch the film and react like John Nash's wife, Alicia: care for him, get annoyed and angry with him, but ultimately love him and want to see him succeed. But as viewers, Ron Howard and company try to manipulate our emotions without creating a 3D character or an involving story.

The film spans almost fifty years in the life of famed mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr. As we meet him, he is an awkward Princeton student who doesn't exactly fit in, but is loosened up by his freewheeling English student roomate Charlie (Paul Bettany). He's pretty much just an outcast at school. He writes his doctorate on a "completely original idea," and becomes a professor. He falls in love with one of his students named Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), and eventually they are married.

But their marital bliss is short-lived when he is approached by a CIA operative named William Parcher (Ed Harris) to crack some codes about the location of a bomb. In the midst of all of this, he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which is putting a strain on his marriage as he sees things that are not real. Ultiamtely, the story has a happy ending because, well, it was produced in Hollywood and directed by Ron Howard.

There are two main problems with "A Beautiful Mind." Instead of getting a 3-dimensional portrayal of John, we get events from his life. We learns thing ABOUT him and his accomplishments, but never anything of great import. The filmmakers would like us to feel sympathetic towards him, but we don't know who he is or what he stands for. We know was awkward in college. We know that he loves math. And he lets us know that he really wants to have "intercourse" with Alicia, but we only have an idea of who this man is. So, in the end we don't see a character, we see a skeleton.

The "story" is a complete wreck. They time shifts are sudden and jarring, and the previous scenes and problems are never satisfactorially dealt with. There are plot strands left unraveled and things left unsaid, and just when you think there might be some kind of conclusion in sight, the director, writer, and editor feel the need to jump to another point in Nash's life. The effect is confusing, and sometimes, outright baffling.

Akiva Goldsman (that terrific scripter of "Lost In Space" and "Batman and Robin") puts his talent for bad dialogue on display here. One specific sequence I remember is when Alicia goes back to visit one of John's friends, Richard Sol (played nicely by Adam Goldberg), and he asks her how she's holding up. Her response is not unpredictable because Goldsman went straight to the handbook for suffering wife monologues and pulled out the most inane passage and committed it to paper. Connelly's emotions in the scene do override the cheese factor as you can actually believe her when she says it.

The film has some off-kilter pacing. A specific timeframe that I realized was out of whack was the time period from when John is "captured" and taken to the hospital and given medicine to when he is at home working and living a semi-normal existence (although these scenes are given to some delusions on John's part). The entirety of these events plays out in about 20-minutes total. That seems a little too fast to me, especially since we don't know the character all that well. The frantic pacing seems very odd, because there are events that could have been edited out (like the "pen scene" towards the end) to make room for more convincing and deeply felt portraits of this man's life.

But fear not, for there are some elements of merit here. From a technical standpoint the film is absolutely gorgeous. The cinematography is rich, vibrant, and crisp and really frames the film well. The direction is solid but not Award worthy, and the acting is all around great. One little thing that bugged me (again, from a technical standpoint) was the constant use of the score. At first it was nice, it was haunting and beautiful, and everything you could wish for, but the frequent overusage grows tiresome.

Russel Crowe is not the problem that the character doesn't work. He tries his damndest to imbue John with some sort of humanity and personality, and it shows. His work here was worthy of his NOMINATION. The tics are all perfect, but his accent was really off and very obviously so. Jennifer Connelly may have well-earned her Supporting Actress award...back in 2000's "Requiem For a Dream," film that Howard and producer partner Brian Grazer had seen her in right before deciding she was THE ONE. Her performance here is head and shoulders above the crap material she is given to work with, and her dynamic with Crowe is great.

I thought it was interesting as I was watching it, to compare her performance here to that of Halle Berry's in "Monster's Ball." Not as big of a stretch as you would think. They both are very emotional characters with strong wills to survive and to prosper. Connelly however, wins the competition hands down. Just watch as she is told of her husband's sickness. A single tear trickles down her face. She doesn't go for the outragous (and let's face it, less effective) window-pounding and screaming. Her low-key performance may not seem so remarkable at first, but in the end, you know that the Academy had made the right decision for once.

"A Beautiful Mind" should have been better. It doesn't flow like great dramas should. Instead, it is messy and convoluted and completely shallow. This isn't a heavy film, and it's not as important as it thinks it is. It simply seemed to have the luck of the draw on Oscar night. This is one mishap that will go down with "Gladiator"'s victory.


-Brian Jones, July 2002