Dumb and Dumber!

Rating: 2/10 (17 February 2003)

If you're going to make a film for grown-ups, treat the audience like grown-ups. Instead, Opie extracts the aspects of John Nash's life and person he decided we grown-ups couldn't handle. Gone is Nash's racism, snobbery, arrest for indecent exposure, history of violent behavior, messy relationships with both sexes, the woman and son he abandoned, the voices that told him aliens were transmitting messages to him via the New York Times, the repeated stays at various loony bins, the nine months he spent wandering Europe trying to renounce his citizenship, the fact that Alicia divorced him in 1963, and that their son is schizophrenic. In short, gone is everything about Nash that made him such a enigmatic yet despicable human being to begin with.
The whitewashing doesn't end there. Parcher calling Joe McCarthy "an idiot", and proclaiming how the atomic bombs "evaporated 150,000 people" has no business being in the movie, as such "opinions" were totally foreign to most Americans, and certainly to those who worked for the government (even those who were figments of one's imagination).
Crowe as Rain Man and Connelly as the Long-Suffering Wife does not tell us what kept (and keeps) Nash and Alicia together. The cruel irony that a man who finessed a mathematical theory of rational behavior should succumb to insanity is totally lost on Opie and fellow hack Akiva Goldsman. Instead, they suggest that if you learn to "ignore" your imaginary friends, then you will be "cured" of whatever ails you. It's a false and outrageous notion.