Though designed to be prestigious, the beauty does manage to come through

Rating: 7/10 (20 July 2007)

In retrospect, it isn't surprising that Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind" won the Academy Award for Best Picture: it's a sentimental and yet highly dramatic package which takes a time-worn theme for the movies (mental illness) and gives it a few new twists (the Academy normally frowns on edgy concepts--this one has an old-fashioned set-up and a lead performance preconceived to be a triumph, yet it has a toughness to its narrative which feels very modern). In 1947 Princeton, mathematician John Nash is flailing away at an economics theory while all his male classmates just want to get laid (the film equates the average Princeton male with the type of guys typical to "Happy Days"); five years later, Nash is working with the Pentagon on numerical formation patterns and appears to be pulled into a conspiracy plot to thwart the Russians from detonating their H-Bomb on American soil. The film has a rocky first hour, with Howard indeed setting up the plot mechanisms but also giving us a main character who is disconnected, a failure at social interaction, and a really bad first date (future-wife Jennifer Connelly doesn't escape easily herself, and she's stuck with dim thoughts such as "God must be a painter, why else would there be so many colors?"). Still, by the second act, Nash's personal crisis has become more clear to us, more involving and gripping, and Russell Crowe isn't so much deliberately one-note as he is intensely focused (the actorly tics come later, yet when they do they are almost endearing). The film has that slick look of "grand entertainment"--designed to win awards--but there are miraculous moments: Nash neglecting to take his medicine and discovering an entire covert operation going down in his backyard shed; Nash, recuperating, riding his bicycle in an infinity pattern, scribbling numbers in the air with his finger. The mental institution stuff is the cinematic equivalent of treading water (and wastes Christopher Plummer as a doctor), but the last half of the film is quite good: a brilliant but disturbed professor working his damnedest to overcome his demons, helped along by a loving woman, and receiving the kind of respect he never dreamed of. Sentimental? Yes, but I don't believe it's dishonest sentiment. Ron Howard isn't always graceful or sensitive (especially in the electric shock sequence), but he does resurrect a tired genre and ultimately makes it a moving experience. *** from ****