HAS OSCAR LOST ITS "MIND"?!?

Rating: 1/10 (2 March 2002)

****SPOILERS AHEAD****
I've heard it been said that this film is "not your typical Hollywood movie", in that Ron Howard stays away from overt sentimentality, swelling violins and other devices used to club audiences over the head and send them home in a euphoric, feel-good haze that doesn't dissipate until the last bought and paid-for Academy Award is handed out on Oscar night.
Yes, Ron Howard stays away from overt sentimentality. And he stays away from everything else, too. Including moments that might reveal character, facts that would tell an honest, cohesive story and ANYTHING that would help make a captive audience believe in and care about what they're watching. Instead, we're led along through a series of hokey scenes showing John Nash at school, clearly AN OUTSIDER (watch how he upends a chess board! thrill as he tosses furniture out of a window! cheer while he launches a textbook into a garbage can and teaches the class HIS way!). Every time a moment comes along that might actually reveal character...SMASH!...cut to "two years later". Then Nash meets a girl in his class whose only apparent attribute is that she has the balls to tell a bunch of construction workers to shut up. Soon they're pointing at stars, then they're on a picnic then...BANG!...suddenly they're married! The entire flick has this rapid, TV movie-like pacing. Nothing is ever earned. All of the scenes are thrown at us in neat, easy-to-digest, simple-for-a-big-dumb-audience-to-understand fashion. Yet despite this rapid (vapid) pacing, the movie drags and sags.
As for a lack of swelling violins, uber-composer James Horner - raising "Titanic" - reprises the syrupy flutes from that film, to indicate to the audience of this film that THIS IS AN EMOTIONAL MOMENT. And a good thing, too, because the routine acting and the banal dialogue sure doesn't.

Russell Crowe's acting is uneven at best. In one scene he comes off as a shy, innocent dullard, then he's an arrogant prick, then back again. I understand he's supposed to be schizophrenic but there's a certain measuredness - a balanced realness - that's required to make any performance credible - even a schizophrenic. This is not displayed at all, and the result is that he lost my believability for the character and my sympathy for his situation. Top that off with an Aussie accent one minute, then some fake-o West Virginia country boy twang the next, then back again....there's a hundred other actors that, despite the handicap of Ron Howard's direction, could have brought this role to life. Don't get me wrong. Russell Crowe is a great actor. From "Romper Stomper" to "The Insider" he has given some amazing performances, but he was really the wrong choice here.
Jennifer Connelly, so great in "Requiem for a Dream", gives a throwaway performance here. In her defense, the role written for her is a WASTE. In scene after stilted scene, she plays the dutiful, suffering wife. Fine, she stuck with her husband throughout his "ordeal" (such as it was....this movie's idea of the torment of an unhinged mind boils down to a roomful of magazine clippings and yarn! scary!), but WHY!? Why not invite the audience into her mind as well, show us her trials, her demons, her reasons for hanging on? Certainly someone living with a schizophrenic 24 hours a day must have some story of her own to tell? Where is the slow, measured wearing-down of HER sanity? Instead we get a marginal acting job of a woman staring out a window with tears running down her face. POOF! Suddenly they have a child! WHY!? Was this planned? What are the ramifications now? How does Nash perceive the child? When the baby almost drowns (a scene that could have been and should have been extremely harrowing and emotionally wrenching) I DIDN'T EVEN CARE!!
Finally, it's unclear what this film is even ABOUT. Schizophrenia? "Sybil" - a TV movie - was far more compelling, believable and informative. A mathematician? What did he accomplish? Aside from the windowpane scrawlings at the beginning of the movie, I never saw him contribute anything mathematical. A teacher? There is about five minutes of film showing him teaching, but fails to detail his accomplishments, his inspiration to his students, his relationships with his peers and other faculty - NOTHING. A Nobel Prize winner? For what? Admittedly, I fell asleep during the last five or ten minutes of the film, just prior to him making his big acceptance speech. Perhaps I missed some bit of information, but what did he win a Nobel Prize for, being a psychotic jerk? The movie neither shows nor tells anything that might support otherwise.

In short, this movie is by-the-numbers filmmaking, and continues to add to the less-than-lackluster directing talents of Ron Howard. From what I understand, John Nash lived quite a colorful life that included womanizing, a nasty divorce, homosexual affairs, violent outbursts and strokes of mathematical genius that apparently changed our economic system. Was any of this portrayed in this piteous, watered-down film? NO!!! Somewhere here there is a good, compelling story that should have been told by a better director - and a better writer (it's not solely Howard's fault). Instead we get this manipulative, clap-trap crowd pleaser, showered with Oscar nominations and (rather appropriately) destined to take its place alongside "The English Patient". It's unfortunate that John Nash's life was reduced to this treacle. This "Beautiful Mind" was a terrible thing for Ron Howard - and Akiva Goldsman - to waste.