A Beauty Undermined

Rating: 4/10 (11 November 2002)

Brilliant mathematician, John Nash (Crowe) becomes embroiled in counter espionage work in the Cold War peak '50's and his grip on reality takes a turn for the worst. He is helped by the love of a good woman though...
God awful ruination of a potentially revelatory story is woefully pithy; insensitively directed and features the worst Crowe performance since he hit Hollywood! The dialogue is a collection of wannabe profound soundbites which convince neither as the musings of the characters saying them or as the deep aphorisms the writer mistakenly perceived he was educating us all with. Howard's direction seems (almost purposefully) to miss the entire point that this should be a SUBTLE study of descent into and battling with madness. Instead we see the Hollywood lexicon for what thick viewers will recognise as madness: Nash gets angry for no reason; Nash writhes and foams; Nash chases his own tail; etc... And as pedestrian as Howard's non-functioning direction is - it isn't remotely helped by Crowe's interpretation of a tortured genius as: Spacker Camp! Crowe's grossly offensive (clearly un-thought out) attempt to portray insanity as a man walking around with the initial symptoms of cerebral palsy and talking with an affected, pseudo-effeminate register is the stuff of notoriety. This performance will come to haunt Crowe when right minded people wake up from their understandable reverie of rooting for the tortured soul and realise that a fine film is waiting to be made about John Nash and his tragic illness and this lame, gross affrontary is not it!