An unusually complex and adventurous Hollywood biopic.

Rating: 7/10 (10 February 2002)

An unusually complex and adventurous Hollywood biopic, A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe as Nobel Laureate John Nash, is a likely 2001 Best Picture nominee  and given its Academy-pleasing inspirational-triumph-over-disability main story line, I wouldn't be surprised if it took the whole enchilada.
The film's early scenes are richly scripted (and daringly slow paced) to establish Nash's mathematical genius. We listen to him talk math with his fellow 1940s graduate students at Princeton University. We try to follow his obsessive problem solving on windows and any other handy surface. More mysteriously, we observe him observing group dynamics from pigeons to barflies, moving, we ultimately learn, ever more profoundly toward his Adam Smith-revising epiphany. All this is done with enough surface realism to convince us that the character is actually doing what he is supposed to be so good at  a much more difficult task when the character's accomplishments are mainly ratiocinative (writers, philosophers, and scientists) than when the character leaves a physical mark on society (artists, soldiers, politicians). If nothing else, A Beautiful Mind will provoke many viewers into looking up the mathematical/economic theories of the real John Nash.
Complicating this tale of genius (and, of course, attracting Hollywood to it), is Nash's decades-long descent into, and recovery from, serious mental illness. While the film's depiction of schizophrenia continues to receive praise from the mental health community for its accuracy and sympathy, the stylistic approach walks a line  not always soberly  between effective drama and preternatural hokum lifted from The Sixth Sense. Since the director (Ron Howard) carefully restricts the film's first two acts to Nash's point of view, the audience has little or no means of perceiving the increasing paranoid madness that envelopes the character, especially given the generally paranoia-producing milieu of post- World War II American society. For much of the movie, in fact, the plot seems to be following the 'just because I'm-paranoid doesn't mean that they are NOT out to get me' formula of many a Hollywood political thriller, most elaborately illustrated/parodied in Conspiracy Theory.
But in an inspired moment of Hitchcockian reversal, the last act shifts the point of view to Nash's wife as she discovers (and thereby we also discover) that her husband is truly insane. Ironically, Nash manages to break himself out of his subjective prison by marshaling his logical powers to the examination of a crucial piece of 'data' that leads ineluctably to the proof of his own madness. Upon this Cartesian foundation and with the help of his heroically loyal wife (Jennifer Connelly), Nash spends the years leading up to and beyond his Nobel Prize in Economics warding off the demons of delusion through the concentrated application of reason.
Despite a little overblown sentimentality in its final scenes, A Beautiful Mind delivers some interesting existential observations about the powers as well as limits of love and reason as momentary stays against the confusions of mind and society. And if it turns out to be this year's Best Picture Award recipient, well, it certainly won't be the least worthy one in recent years.