Not so beautiful

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2002)

Somewhere buried beneath all the treacly dialogue, emotional cues, and hero shots in `A Beautiful Mind' is a good film struggling to get out. To its credit, the film doesn't preach about the inherent nobility of its schizophrenic protagonist as much as it could, although it still tries to convince us that everything, even debilitating mental illness, will work out okay, as long as we believe in the Power Of Love. Robin Williams has destroyed his career with this stuff - indeed, director Ron Howard seems determined to snatch from Steven Spielberg the tainted mantle of this country's most broadly popular, and tragically wasted, filmmaking talent. Darren Aronofsky covered this same territory in `Pi' a few years ago, but stripped away the sentiment and soft-focus to emerge with a much edgier and more interesting film. Russell Crowe is John Nash, a mathmetician-savant with some odd behavioral tics. Nash doesn't much like people, because people don't tend to warm to his erratic behavior and mumbled insults as much as they do to, say, puppies. We meet Nash as a Princeton grad student, where he is the butt of his classmates' jokes, and is in danger of flunking out for failing ever to attend class, nor even to propose a topic for his dissertation. However, as the movies have taught us, a serendipitous breakthrough is always around the corner. A gorgeous blond in a bar presents Nash with a moment of clarity, and his subsequent critique of the prevalent mathematical paradigms of the day earns him a prestigious career at MIT, and eventually catches the eye of the Pentagon. He begins to work covertly as a codebreaker for the feds, but becomes increasingly worried as the depth of his commitment is made clear. Will his shadowy government contact really keep him safe from the Russians, as promised? What will his wife think when she find out? Do his colleagues know the extent of his involvement with the government?
As expected, none of this is what it seems. Nash is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and the boundaries between fantasy and reality suddenly come into question. `A Beautiful Mind' skillfully delivers a first-person experience of the terror and bewilderment that is schizophrenia, and has fun with Nash's own sense of humor about his illness. Russell Crowe delivers a solid performance that far surpasses his Oscar-winning turn in Gladiator (which isn't saying much), but the part has the stink of one that was written with Oscar in mind for whatever leading man of the moment was lucky enough to win it. By the time Nash's condition has been made clear, director Ron Howard is already firmly in hero-worship mode. The ennobling music and absolute poignancy with which Howard presents his story seem to dare us to exhibit anything other than utter idolatry for his subject. As Nash's wife Alicia, Jennifer Connelly is forced to utter platitudes like `I can see glimpses of the man I married, and that's enough' without rolling her eyes or vomiting stomach acid. The absurdity culminates with Nash's acceptance of the Nobel Prize, which he dedicates to Alicia for standing by him all these years, and helping him complete the journey that got him there. Indeed, a beautiful woman by my side, and even a touch of paranoid schizophrenia, would have made my own journey to the end of `A Beautiful Mind' considerably less painful.