Opie disappoints

Rating: Null/10 (10 July 2002)

While the Missus was moved to tears, I was only vaguely engaged by any of BEAUTIFUL MIND, and that was wholly due to Crowe's performance, which was, as always, superb. His over-the-top rendering of a man with a mental illness is right in the RAINMAN-AWAKENINGS-FORREST GUMP school of star vehicles and he does not disappoint. Russell Crowe is an old-time Hollywood movie star. And that's not intended as an insult.
My problem with BM (did I just say that?) is not that I felt "manipulated" or "cheated" or lied to by Opie in the telling of the story, which is a complaint I've heard from others who compare the movie (unfavorably) to SIXTH SENSE. Hell. ALL stories are manipulative. It's just that the good ones do it with the curtains more firmly drawn.
No, my problem was the structure of the narrative. Essentially, none of the movie's three acts sync up very well, and their very different tones and styles resulted in very different levels of involvement for me at different points throughout the film.
Act I is the deranged genius finding his "great idea" at Princeton. I liked this part very much. It smacks of all the great many "genius" movies, as a strange outsider wins a place in the world by seeing through it to the "governing dynamics" that rule it. LITTLE MAN TATE. SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER. GOOD WILL HUNTING. Lots of Ken Russell films, and others I can't think of at this moment.
Act II, which begins with his job at MIT, is a cold-war/code-breaking thriller, with a building, creepy sense of paranoia and unreality in what is supposed to be a true story. So, despite Crowe's magnetic portrayal, I was profoundly distanced by what seemed like a genre treatment of a man's actual life, especially as it followed the "realism" of Act I.
Crowe falls in love with and marries the beautiful, compassionate and slightly odd Jennifer Connolly (after all, who wouldn't?), but I never bought into this relationship. I just couldn't see what she saw in him. But, that's probably because I didn't think Connolly was all that convincing, despite her classical beauty. She suffers from LTS. Liv Tyler Syndrome. Also, the script doesn't give us much reason to see very deeply into a love that must eventually overcome the most daunting obstacles in Act III, and become the hook on which this whole concoction must hang. Opie is requiring the one scene of Crowe `drawing' pictures in the stars for Connolly to carry the entire weight of this `magical' relationship, and it buckles under the tonnage.
Act III begins with the big "reveal" in the mental hospital about Nash's delusions, and you realize you've been watching a false story for about an 1 hour and a half, which breeds in the viewer either resentment or admiration toward the film. In either case, whatever your reaction, you are now in a different movie for the last 30-40 minutes, and the gear change is a grinding from which I never recovered.
We now watch as a mentally ill man faces the challenge of overcoming insurmountable obstacles, which he does through the love of a good woman. Sniff, sniff.
Now, look. I'm as big a sucker as anybody for the "love conquers all" motif. But that kind of thing has to be set up from the beginning, and every fiber of the film has to echo it. PRELUDE TO A KISS comes to mind. Or, In PRINCESS BRIDE, where not only is the story-within-the-story about "true love", but the framing device of the grandfather reading to his sick grandchild echoes that theme as well. "As you wish". indeed. It has got to have a magical quality of transcendence to work right in a story.
In BM, though, we don't even MEET the love interest until Act 2, just under halfway thru the movie. And, right after the courtship and marriage, we're caught up in all the espionage nonsense. All we see then is the hell their relationship has become, and his institutionalization, and the aftermath played out in Act 3. He almost drowns their baby, for chrissakes! And I'm supposed to cheer that she decides to stay with him? Why? Because he's SMART? Because theirs is a wonderful love story? Who says?
The speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony struck a patently false note, as Opie tries to tie up all the threads of the movie into a love story that is wholly undeveloped, with an ending that is wholly unearned. In fact, the most moving and real moments in the movie for me were (1) where he says good-bye to his "little girl" delusion, and (2) where he receives pens from his colleagues in the dining room at Princeton.
The "little girl" thing just struck me on a personal level, as I related it to saying goodbye forever to my own daughter. The "pen scene', though, is the essential core of the story. It's about a guy who wanted RECOGNITION for his genius, at whatever the cost, because without that he was just a deranged West Virginian with no social skills whose life was utterly meaningless. And after a lifetime of pain and suffering, both endured and inflicted, he finally gets that recognition. Well. good for him. But is that a "want" worthy of a story's protagonist? I don't know. `Attention must be paid' was certainly good enough motivation for Willy Loman. Of course, Willy DIES at the end, and DEATH OF A SALESMAN is a TRAGEDY wherein we mourn a man who wanted the wrong things out of life, and not a `feel good'/Hollywood movie intending to CELEBRATE Loman's life (well, it might be if filmed today, but that's another story.).
As I said, my wife liked it, and I didn't hate it. Which doesn't suck on a Saturday night, when the sitter is watching the kids. I just don't see what the big deal is about this very flawed movie, shifting as it does from narrative to narrative, without really engaging me on any level for any sustained period.
Opie does much better with more straightforward unambiguous material, like APOLLO 13. Stories that require more abstract, shaded, ambivalent qualities are just out of his range, I think.