A Beautiful Mind

Rating: 7/10 (4 April 2010)

Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind" has been popularly considered a masterpiece. Certainly the film is very well acted. Russel Crowe delivers a remarkable performance as the highly gifted mathematician John Nash verging on madness. Jennifer Connelly gives a capable performance as Nash's wife Alicia. Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer and others also put in good performances. The movie is also technically impressive and the musical soundtrack is wonderful, except for that Charlotte Church song at the end. But "A Beautiful Mind" is only a superficial masterpiece because it never achieves greatness.
I have not reached this conclusion lightly. I gave this film considerable thought because, although I instinctively thought that something big was missing, I was not sure what that something was. Then it struck me. The problem with "A Beautiful Mind" is really its tendency to oversimplify its subject matter. Great films force people to think and usually require more than one viewing to be understood. But Director Ron Howard's fault is in making films, like "A Beautiful Mind," that explain everything to the audience in very simple terms. Howard does not seem to understand that the people who go to see films, like "A Beautiful Mind," do not like an oversimplified story, because simplicity is boring. In making this criticism, I am referring to scenes like the one where John Nash's brilliant mathematical insight was explained in a very basic analogy of several men completing for one blonde woman in a bar. These men decide to change their strategy by working together toward a lesser goal - going after the brunettes - so that they all get laid. As I saw this scene, I realized that Ron Howard cares far more about towing the line of the Hollywood establishment than with the art of filmmaking. Hollywood's unspoken assumption has been for the last 30 years to oversimplify every story in order to make a film understandable even to unintelligent viewers and in the process get more people to buy theatre tickets. When set against this deplorable standard, "A Beautiful Mind" delivers.
The only trick that "A Beautiful Mind" has up its sleeve is that the world that the John Nash character imagines is actually real. But once that trick is exposed, the plot is completely bereft of original ideas. Thereafter, the story line goes through all the motions of resolving the conflict and arriving at a happy ending -- and the experience of watching this film becomes boring and predictable. Even the ending, which is as artificial as the one in "2012," can be anticipated by the middle of this film. "A Beautiful Mind" is not a bad film. It can be quite interesting at times. But there is something lacking and artificial about this movie because it is all based on a trick on the mind - that we are in the beginning not sure about whether John Nash's weltanschauung is real or not. After we discover the trick, the only thing that we have left to do is wait for the movie to end. Russell Crowe's performance is worthy of an Oscar and yet by the same token the John Nash character is let down by the screenplay and direction. There is no attempt made to explain the complexities of the John Nash character. We are simply told that he has gone mad and to accept that. Considering all the great films that have gone much further in adding depth and fascination to their characters, the John Nash of this picture (he is much more interesting in real life) is a bit of a let down. There is also little effort made in explaining the wonders of mathematics, even though John Nash appreciated the potential of his craft well enough to come up with some very unique ideas. Instead math and madness are reduced to mcguffins for a simple love story between John and Alicia that never was. The real Alicia Nash divorced her husband during his prolonged spell with madness.
6.5/10