Flak Magazine: Review of A Beautiful Mind, 1-7-02

Even before A Beautiful Mind was made, John Forbes Nash Jr. was by far one of the best-known academics among teen and college-aged movie-goers. If you had taken any economics course at any point in your life, the one name, aside from Adam Smith, that you would walk away with Nash — as in Nash equilibrium, the most basic economic concept beyond supply and demand. It's a simple two-by-two grid demonstrating that two parties working together realize greater shared utility than any scenario where at most one success can be achieved.

And it absolutely, positively cannot be integrated as a controlling metaphor for a film review, no matter how many attempts are made.

So let's use a different concept entirely: the Trent Dilfer theory. In other words, your quarterback doesn't need win games as much as he needs not to lose them. And director Ron Howard does exactly that with this film.

Like most outings where Howard does something right, you can only praise him with faint damns. He directs as if the director had no right to auteurship. What's his stamp on A Beautiful Mind? Is it the gray wash over almost every shot? The requisite Dreamworks special effects fiddling? The use of Comm Arts 101 textbook shots and sequences?

The same issues have plagued past Howard pieces: Apollo 13, for instance — excellent topic matter and merely OK as a movie. But, but, he doesn't lose the game; certainly, Ron Howard is not a bad director. With A Beautiful Mind, he constructs a linear story with a consistent look that tracks John Nash's descent and rise across 50-odd years. Howard's work is helped immensely by Akiva Goldsman's sly conversion of Sylvia Nasar's biography of the same name.

The story has a problem with pacing. A Beautiful Mind moves delicately through the first act, taking its time to paint Nash a genius and a crab. Through the second act, it engages the audience with his top-secret codebreaking for the government. The catch, though, is the denouement; once Christopher Plummer reveals that Nash's eccentricities belie schizophrenia, the story rolls into a biopic that races to the present.

But there's enough solid content to distract from the awkward cadence, and the movie is enriched beyond wildest dreams by Russell Crowe's performance. Tracking a man through a half-century yields certain opportunities to flex the acting muscle, and Crowe give a Charles Atlas performance. The viewer is treated to so many facets of the acting arsenal that you can not only enjoy the performance but treat it like a master class and learn from it. It easily trumps any Best Actor performance of the past decade.

In addition, when Nash's schizophrenia manifests itself, it's as voices in his head, and many may think the unique way the film dramatizes this is too clever (it's definitely too much of a spoiler to get into). But make no mistake: This twist is integral of the story. In fact, it's vital to the story, about as far from token as possible.

It's interesting that Howard and Goldsman took such license with Nash's story, though; as surely as college econ students have heard Nash's name, they've also heard that he was a legendary prick, above and beyond what the film suggests. He also dabbled in bisexuality and believed in aliens, but those parts are excised from the narrative. It wouldn't have been a stretch for Crowe to play gay; he did just that in 1994's The Sum of Us. Still, Mind seems to be guilty of the same crimes that other true-life stories (The Hurricane, The Insider) commit — the juicy stuff is either stretched or nipped and tucked.

The rest of the cast performs admirably. The risk here was of turning into 2001's version of Pollock; if you've seen one movie about an artist with problems, some may think you've seen them all. Jennifer Connelly's role as Mrs. Nash has been likened to Marcia Gay Harden's role as Leigh, but Connelly is robbed of golden opportunities. Howard's decision to not show the progression of Nash's healing left her with just one touching scene at a critical juncture followed by a swoooosh to the near-present, gaily skipping past her character's climax of accomplishment. Ed Harris plays Ed Harris; it's disappointing, really, to follow up an eccentric Oscar nomination by just playing yourself in the next year's critical darling.

Most notable of the co-stars is Paul Bettany, a joy as Nash's friend and roommate. Crowe dots the narrative with enough comic detail to leaven the drama, but Bettany blasts the humor wide open by basically reprising his Chaucer turn from A Knight's Tale. Then, all of a sudden, his character turns on a dime and takes on darkness for the unravelling. He is a gift to this film.

Howard took a good story, surrounded it by a good — excellent at parts, average at others — cast and put out a good film. Not great, but good. Vanilla. It will sell tickets and likely get America's favorite teen-star-turned-director nominations here and there. It's good enough to prevent most people from wondering how powerful the film would have been with a director's stamp on it. This is media for the masses, though, and Howard's tailoring away from the obscure and toward the mainstream is probably a win.

— Andy Stilp (andy.stilp at gmail dot com)