A simplistic mind...

Rating: 6/10 (2 April 2002)

As a movie, A Beautiful Mind works well enough - in fact, it comes off as a standard Hollywood "man meets adversity and conquers it with the support of a loyal woman" film.
Watching it though, I couldn't help feeling that a complex life had been simplified and ironed out to fit that standard mold. What do we know of the real man behind the film, at the end? Do we get any sense of the complexity of his achievements, or of his problems? If I were to believe this movie, I would believe that Nash had only one single idea in his life, and a simple (if pervasive) problem to face.
Unfortunately, at the end, I'm left with the images of Crowe acting out nervous tics, and Jennifer Connelly playing the impossibly loyal wife.
The IMDB info for this film says that "A number of facts in John Nash's life were intentionally altered for dramatic and commercial reasons" - unfortunately, so many of them that in the end A Beautiful Mind felt like a lie to me. Ron Howard got his dramatic and commercial success, but something significant was lost in the translation...