A Beautiful Lie

Rating: 1/10 (19 September 2010)

If this movie is the nadir of Hollywood dishonest trickery and whitewashed falsehoods masquerading as fact, how does one explain its popularity? Here are some clues:
In the part where the film does talk about mathematics, it makes the viewer feel that he is more intelligent than he actually is, which is always a good idea when you're aiming for the lowest common denominator and you want your picture to sell tickets in the Ozarks as well as in Hollywood.
In the part where the film talks about romance, the worst possible woman's picture clichés are dragged out to show Nash as "different" and desirable. In actuality, he was nerdish, odd and gay.
In the part that talks about his schizophrenia, terrible care is taken to avoid mentioning the fact that the 1950's persecution of homosexuals had a lot to do with Nash's worsening condition. John Nash was forced to conceal his homosexuality and was persecuted for it by the same government that expected him to decrypt secrets for them and keep quiet about it. If that isn't enough to turn any brilliant mind into a paranoid-schizophrenic, I really don't know what is.
In all the other parts, the bad script and the bad out-of-place acting by miscast actors are immensely aided by photographic special effects and by the music (or rather non-music) of James Horner, the inventor of today's omnipresent minimalist "fear music", where the cinema's sub-woofers are put to maximum use to make the viewer feel danger directly through his anal sphincter, the only part of one's anatomy that is actually needed to "enjoy" this film as written.