A Beautiful Film

Rating: 8/10 (12 April 2003)

WARNING: Contains Spoilers
When A Beautiful Mind first took home the oscars for best picture and director in 2001, I was incensed that Lord of the Rings was so overlooked. Six months later, I looked back and laughed. I marvelled at how I could have been so caught up in LOTR hype that I had forgotten what a truly brilliant film this was.
There is never any doubting the awesome power of this film. It's a movie like two weights attached to your tear ducts that keep getting heavier and heavier until you finally give in to temptation and weep into your hands.
However, there are a few questions raised by this film. For one thing, it has been much publicised recently that it presents a fake, Hollywood depiction of schizophrenia, and the real disorder is completely dissimilar to what is portrayed here. The film tries to compensate for this by suggesting that this is highly advanced and it has gone on untreated for many years in John Nash's mind.
For one who has not read the Sylvia Nasar's book, I cannot be sure how accurate a depiction this is, I would suggest that Akiva Goldsman and Ron Howard took a lot of artistic license to this film to create a more moving, and dare I say, perhaps more interesting story. Not that the results isn't good, I just think it's important that when you watch this for the first time, you are made more aware that you are watching the story of a man called John Nash, rather than necessarily a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash.
The other question that is raised, at least for me, is what is the magnitude of Nash's hallucinations? On the surface we are led to believe that his hallucinations stretch the extent of an imaginary room-mate, an imaginary niece and an imaginary job for the department of the defence led by an imaginary man in a hat and coat. But obviously it's more degenerative than this. He imagines an entire workforce with a large amount of tracking and locating devices, a radium implant in his arm. Later, he completely imagines all of this machinery moved to a small shed not a hundred metres from his back fence. When you stop to think about it, it begins to seem a little far-fetched. Another question as well, how much else did he hallucinate? The first time he drops a letter in the private mailbox, a car drives past and someone stares at him, who he immediately suspects is a Russian. Did the car really drive past or did he just imagine it? It's possible that it did, I mean if one drives past an old ramshackle, abandoned house and there's a man dropping off a parcel, one would most likely stare. But obviously at this stage of the game, the audience is living out Nash's dreamscape. But once we find out that none of this is real, these earlier raised questions beg some scrutinising, in my opinion.
However, if you don't think about it, it's brilliant. Russell Crowe is superb in an incredibly hard role, Jennifer Connelly also brilliant, and Ed Harris dazzles as usual. It's superbly intricate in its direction and it manages to mix tension and suspense with human emotion to a masterful degree.
The artistic license may take a lot of the realism out of the story but it definitely doesn't detract from the effect. 4 1/2 stars out of 5.