Absolutely Brilliant

Rating: Null/10 (30 November 2003)

*Minor Spoilers*
I'm an aspiring screenwriter. The key task in writing a screenplay is to try to find a way to demonstrate physically, through worldly events, what is happening to a character emotionally.
I absolutely love movies. I'm an intense person, and movies are a great way for both my intellect and my emotions to be engaged simultaneously. My love of movies has a flipside: I ABHOR badly-written movies. I actually get into a bad mood when I see a bad movie.
This is why I loved _A Beautiful Mind_. From the first moment, the film draws you into its world, until you are completely immersed in its reality, the reality of its characters, setting, and events. Of course, to the audience, the film is a fantasy world that we experience for about two hours.
But what if the character's reality turns out to be false? The audience is in a character's reality, but that reality is a fantasy. In his world, the character must now distinguish between that which is real and that which is fantasy. And the audience must sift through two competing fantasies (the audience's experience of the film being the first fantasy, and the character's fantasy being the second). And the screenwriter (Akiva Goldsman) has to keep all this straight, without being inconsistent, and provide meaning, and do it without being sappy or cliche or predictable.
Goldsman pulls it off in grand style. Every moment is intricately defined to fulfill Goldsman's many competing objectives. And THAT'S what makes this film so powerful.
The fact that this is a true story catapults this film into the truly great. If you don't like it, get off the computer and go watch _The Titanic_ or _Big Momma's House_ again. You probably own them.