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I walked into this film knowing absolutely nothing about it, which made it much more suspenseful and gripping than it would have been otherwise. Russell Crowe (Gladiator, The Insider) teams up with director Ron Howard (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Apollo 13) in A Beautiful Mind, a genuinely inspiring true-story drama. I can’t say it moved me to tears, but move me it did, and there are precious few films that can boast that claim these days.
The story is based on the astonishing ordeal of Dr. John Nash, Princeton graduate and genius mathematician suffering from paranoid schizophrenia during a chapter of our country’s history where perhaps even the most stable psychiatrists among us were checking their phones for bugs, or their newspaper headlines for anti-Communist tidings. Preliminary characterization lead me to believe this would be another Good Will Hunting escapade: poor, emotionally challenged genius gets a rough time with his crowd yet is secretly brilliant and blows them all away in competition. Poor, emotionally challenged student works out brilliant equations on a window in his dorm room (rather than his bathroom mirror) but hides his brilliance from the rest of the world.
This quickly proved to not be the case: Crowe's character is anything but likable, even to the audience who cheered for Crowe in nearly every other movie he’s done. He proves his arrogance several times over, first by denouncing his comrades’ classes and books as "deadening the mind," and in an early attempt at exhibiting his genius, losing an Othello game to his rival. Nash struggles fruitlessly through much of his time at Princeton to come up with an "original" theory that no one else has done before while his colleagues publish, and therefore remain imperishable. His saving grace arrives in his conception of the game theory, which lands him a top position at Wheeler, a something or other where he does research, becomes famous, and teaches the occasional class, albeit badly.
It’s difficult to go into much detail from this point without giving the twists and turns of the film away. Nash gets approached by the government for a top secret project to decode Communist messages being spread domestically. Nash agrees, but when he falls in love with and marries a woman willing to accept his eccentricity, he finds his emotional ties interfering with the stress of the high stress security position. This is where the paranoia of the 1950s becomes a concrete presence in the film-Nash’s instability and eventual breakdown probably went twice as far as it would have today, modern psychiatric breakthroughs notwithstanding-which sucks us right into Nash’s personal nightmare of intrigue, conspiracy, and incomprehensible brilliance.
Crowe paints a vivid picture of paranoia coupled with brilliance through a variety of methods-watch how eerie he is in his repetitive hand-touching-forehead gesture--it almost seems as if he's trying to keep a machine from breaking down on him. Jennifer Connelly, as Nash's wife Alicia, comes off as artificial at first--her entrance into his life seems a bit too rehearsed to seem genuinely spontaneous--but her performance as the suffering wife treating Nash’s breakdown is nothing short of majestic. Ed Harris gives power and presence in his role as Parcher, the shadowy government figure, but the spotlight is on Crowe through all of these scenes, and rightfully so. I never did figure out how Crowe landed an Oscar for wielding a sword and lopping off heads in 2000 (effective though his performance was), but I would be hard-pressed to fault the Oscars for tipping their hats in his direction this year.
Typical of many of his films, Howard uses subtle visual effects to convey the brilliance fighting with paranoia within Nash’s mind. Equations leap out from the pages of frenzied notes and perform a myriad of dance patterns; eerie voices whisper equations while the camera pans past Crowe’s dialated gaze. Ultimately, though, the film speaks strongly about what it takes to survive: to not just meet the challenges an exceptional intellect faces but to charge against them head on. With flashy visual effects and the predictable genius-in-the-rough storyline, this would come off as a hokey, clichéd epigraph not even worthy of a Life’s Little Instruction Book. With Crowe quietly convincing us of the horrors and abilities of the mind and the soul, it becomes a modest masterpiece spanning one man’s struggle from fear and impotence to stability and triumph.
-Long
Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©