Undeserving

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 2001)

Minor Spoilers
A Beautiful Mind
I've never been a big fan of Ron Howard nor Akiva Goldsman and maybe this colored my subconcious going into A Beautiful Mind, however I will say that I went into this film wanting to like it; or to love it like so many others have. Unfortunately, I cannot say that this is the case.
As much as people would like to say that Ron Howard has matured as a director, he's still just competent at best. Much like John Nash deciphered simple newspaper headlines I saw through the mechanisms used to bring his story to the screen.
This film is such a hodge-podge of other movies, Fight Club meets Awakenings meets Rain Man come to mind that I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Don't laugh at my comparison, Ron directed The Grinch and Akiva wrote Batman and Robin; these guys are hacks. James Horner even jumps into the act by recycling his Titanic theme during a key scene in the film. I rolled my eyes some more. Horners done this before, but not this obvious. John Nash's winning the Nobel Prize for Economics is skirted over favoring tepid dialog and tear jerking. Perhaps Nash's story wasn't cinematic enough to be told literally that it needed to exagerrate the scizophrenia and romance elements. Further insulting is that the story is not factually correct. Nash clinically did not have schizophrenia until 1959, many years after completing some of his most complicated mathematical work. It is clinically proven that a schizophrenic in incapable of such a task. So much for realism. I'll take David Lynch's take on the subject in Muholland Drive any day over this drivel.
The cast is good as it should be, however I feel Crowe is mis-cast as the lead. He was great as the paranoid everyman in The Insider and believable as a, well gladiator in Gladiator but in Beautiful Mind he seems a little out of place playing an eccentric mathematician. He plays the part well but I unfortunately didn't buy it.
All in all, not a bad film but not deserving of all the acclaim it's receiving.