... is to mathematics what "Amadeus" was to classical music

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2002)

--- SPOILERS--- SPOILERS--- SPOILERS-- A Beautiful Mind is based on the biography of the same title of John Nash (Russell Crowe), the genius mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia. It deals with his student years at Princeton, his formulation of the game-theory work that won him the Nobel Prize, his descent into and unexpected rise out of mental illness, and the effect his illness had on his career and his marriage.
Let me start off by saying I don't care for films where mental illness and psychological problems are considered dramatic devices. As someone who has been in therapy, and whose wife and several members of her family have been practicing therapists, I'm aware how different Hollywood's depiction of psychological problems are from reality. It always seems that the sufferer goes into breakdown mode right at the climax of the film, only to be rescued by the love of a good woman or his best buddy, with the good therapist available on the phone to tell him, at last, the Real Truth ("No! I swear to you, Herb, that Pomeranian is NOT your dead uncle ... you've GOT to believe me for once!!!") . So I'm pretty cool to the pleasures of such films as, say, Ordinary People, The Prince of Tides, Shine, Awakenings, Girl Interrupted and Rain Man (to name just a few of way too many), and I wouldn't really like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest if I thought that it were just about mental illness.
That having been said, I enjoyed this movie immensely because of several things. First of all, even if you know what the movie is about, the moment of Nash's onset of schizophrenia is almost impossible to spot, even in retrospect. And as you follow the story line, you get almost no clue that some characters and situations are hallucinations. The appearance of Ed Harris. as a government agent recruiting Nash as a codebreaker is totally in keeping with the paranoid aspect of the times, and some of the more garish aspects of Nash's belief system (the "radium implant", the "special building" on campus that nobody knows about but him, the car chase) are easily chalked up to, perhaps, shoddy filmmaking. I know that I started to think this was a somewhat amateurish film with all the black hats and talk about the Russians, but I still bought into the fantasy. I guess at some point, I should have started to think,"Whoa .... codes in MAGAZINES? A RADIUM Diode?" .... but we see the action from his point of view and it's close enough to reality to be chillingly convincing. The point here is to make us understand a little but the depth of the problems he faced in trying to discern reality - and it was great to make the most likable character in the movie (Nash's roommate Charles, played by Paul Bettany) one of the imaginary ones. (Reminded me a lot of a certain movie where guys form a club to fight, but I won't reveal that movie's name because that would be wrong.)
Another fine thing about the movie is the Ron Howard's direction. Although Ron Howard's characters have their feet planted firmly in pulp melodrama, they are always redeemed by the extent to which he cares about them and makes us feel the same way. He makes the characters surrounding Nash well fleshed out and likeable, and gives Alicia Nash (Jennifer Connely) a saintliness combined with humanity that, perhaps, the real Alicia may not have had. He lets Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer) be just right in the role: no saint himself, but wanting to try to conquer this affliction, in these pre-Lithium days. We like him, we really like him.
The casting of Christopher Plummer and Ed Harris were both inspired choices. (Let's not quite play "six degrees of Russell Crowe" ... ) You remember Christopher Plummer, don't you? - as Mike Wallace in The Insider, he was one of the people bringing grief to the same Russell Crowe in The Insider. And Ed Harris was famously a secret and nasty G-Man in The Firm. So when these guys show up on-screen they have an extra cachet of credibility in the roles that Nash has cast them in (even though Ed Harris isn't real!).
So, I enjoyed the movie, shed a few tears at his speech to the Nobel audience, felt good and lucky that I don't have this problem, but have a bit of bad taste about a couple of things. For one, it doesn't take a lot of research to show how sanitized this has been. And, curiously, the shaping of this story into a Hollywood arc diminishes the power of the story; if, as really happened, Alicia and John did get divorced, if, indeed, there was no scene with all those noble words about "what's real" ... then how are we to believe that his work really was significant, and mattered in the long run (which it certainly did). And Russell Crowe did a great job of acting, but I gave up waiting for him to decide on an accent. Speech coach, please? He had a good performance up until he walks into that Australian restaurant to play Flight of the Bumblebee ...
Wait. Wrong movie about mental illness. Sorry.
Anyway, I wish someone would cast Russell "Grumpy" Crowe in a comedy and force him to smile. I'm certain that Crowe will score an Oscar for this, and A Beautiful Mind has a good chance of walking off with Best Picture. I'm glad I saw it. But (to reiterate my point above) I have to say I don't want to see Hollywood make any more movies about people with mental illness. Like the way Hollywood deals with religion, the problems of divorced people, prison life, and classical music, there's always something kind of insulting and patronizing about these things being turned into neat dramas for our entertainment.