Manipulation of the best kind

Rating: Null/10 (3 March 2002)

Mental illness often makes compelling cinema - think of `Rain Man' or `Shine'. Now both sides of the Atlantic have produced new movies on this theme, looking at the effect of such illness on brilliant and famous individuals: from the UK there is `Iris' portraying Alzheimer's Disease and from the US comes `A Beautiful Mind' examining paranoid schizophrenia.
This latter work is essentially the story of American mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jnr whose biography of the same name was written by Sylvia Nasar. However, I say 'essentially' because director Ron Howard - known for his 'triumph over adversity' movies (`Apollo 13', `Backdraft', `Parenthood') - has given us a somewhat sentimentalised and sanitised version of a complex life. Nowhere in this film will one learn anything of Nash's homosexuality or importuning, one would never guess about his divorce and remarriage, and we are told nothing of his repressed upbringing or his son's own troubles with schizophrenia.
Having said all this, `A Beautiful Mind' is a must-see movie, primarily because of an outstanding performance from Russell Crowe who plays Nash from his arrival at Princeton in 1947 to his award of the Nobel Prize in 1994. Adopting Nash's West Virginian accent, his ornamental style of speech and mannered mode of movement, this is a character a million miles away from the assured confidence of Maximus in `Gladiator' and will deservedly win him many awards.
Jennifer Connelly is excellent as Nash's wonderfully supportive wife Alicia. Like `Iris', there is not much on the principal's work but, again like `Iris', this is ultimately a love story - an account how a partner can be there when the spouse has literally lost his or her mind. Director Ron Howard skilfully manipulates us, both visually and emotionally but, in a sense, all art is manipulative and, if we fall for the trap, it's because we want to. We want the human spirit to survive and succeed - and here it most assuredly does.