A towering achievement cinematic ally, biographically, and historically.

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2001)

With this film Russell Crowe dispels any doubt that his Oscar for Gladiator was deserved. Had Crowe not alienated the entire Hollywood community with his sullen and belligerent manner in the months leading up to voting, he would have won the Best Actor statue for a second time. And while this is a tragedy of Crowe's own doing, it does not eclipse the satisfaction of Ron Howard finally getting his statue for Best Director.
This is a true story that is sometimes a little taxing to watch, and the dizzying contrast between high and low is something that is only poorly attempted by the likes of contemporaries such as Vanilla Sky.
Speaking of contrast, naysayers who panned Russell as wooden and two-dimensional in Gladiator will have to eat those words as he renders this complex turn that is filled with both vulnerability and hubris, elation and pathos, genius and madness. After all, that's why they call it acting, which Crowe has more than proved he can do.
There isn't a weak performance in the cast, and the only danger is that Crowe has peaked too high too soon, a'la, say Richard Dreyfuss, or, *gasp* Anna Paquin (Hollywood's most underrated young beauty) and even *double gasp*, Tatum O'Neal, and although nobody can accuse Crowe of being an overnight success, performances like this one make us hope he isn't spent any time soon.
The first half of the movie is lyrically beautiful, in which Crowe ascends the throne of the mathematics intelligentsia, meeting his exquisite wife, played beautifully and as a full peer to Crowe by Jennifer Connelly who won a well-deserved Oscar. The second half is, without spoiling it for you, the best suspense you will see since The Sixth Sense. In the end, it wraps up nicely with a bow, and to those whose reviews pretentiously claimed to find the story unbelievable, I can only add, this being a true story, that fact is always stranger than fiction.
Much is left out of Nash's back story, like, among many other things, that he had pronounced homosexual tendencies, and we are never quite given any satisfactory explanation for his descent into madness. Nevertheless, A Beautiful Mind is a towering achievement cinematically, biographically, and historically.