A Beautiful Actor, maybe

Rating: Null/10 (24 March 2002)

Ron Howard, a Hollywood veteran who started as a child actor, has been working his way up as a director from featherweight material ('Splash', 'Cocoon') to more dramatic subjects ('The Paper', 'Apollo 13'), though with a fairly light touch ('Edtv'). Here he has come up with a sanitised biopic of John Nash, the brilliant but schizophrenic Princeton mathematician who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory done many years earlier. Being an old hand, Howard knows no-one never went broke not challenging his audience's intelligence and the significance of Nash's work is explained as a strategy for picking up women in bars. Russell Crowe as Nash keeps it as obvious as he can, with lots of muttering and strange moving about. Naturally there is a love interest in the form of Nash's wife, played nicely by Jennifer Connelly, and some loyal friends, but unfortunately some of Nash's imaginary friends are more interesting than the real ones.
It would be interesting to know just how much work Nash really did for the Pentagon as a breaker of military codes. It is implied the code-breaking work, which he did after obtaining his doctorate, helped push Nash over the edge, but it emerges that he was suffering from delusions even before he left Princeton. Howard's little trick of holding back on the truth about Nash's true state of mind does help us to see things from Nash's perspective, but it also confuses the story. The really interesting thing, which is not adequately explored, is the genius/madman interface. We have plenty of mad people but not too many geniuses, so what is the relationship? All Nash knows is that, stuffed up with pills he may not suffer from delusions and keep quiet but he is not good for much else  even his sex life suffers.
The early inappropriate treatment, insulin shock 'therapy' from Dr Rosen (Christopher Plummer) gave way to less catastrophic medication, but it seems his best work was done before he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. In remission, he was allowed to hang around Princeton and eventually was able to write and teach again, but the early genius does not seem to have returned. Princeton it seems got a bargain  a Nobel Prize from someone who was too cracked to put on the full-time payroll.
Because this is a strictly commercial movie it has to be judged on its entertainment and box office value rather than its contribution to human thought. Howard is quite adventurous in serving up to the great movie-going public a biopic of someone from such an arcane area as pure mathematics, but he does not fail them  there is enough sentiment to satisfy all and a tiny kernel of intellectual interest to satisfy the tiny fraction of us who like that sort of thing in our movies. Russell Crowe, who apparently did not meet Nash until shooting was finished, does a sort of madder version of his 'Insider' character. Crowe and the make-up people handle the aging of his character well (not so Jennifer Connelly who is unrecognisable in her last scenes) but because most of the drama is earlier on, the last few scenes set years later fall a bit flat. 'Enigma' (not yet released in the US) is a much more exciting mathematical espionage story, albeit an old-time thriller. No doubt Oscars will be won, and Howard acclaimed as an artistic genius for what is really just stolid Hollywood entertainment.