|
MOVIE CRITIQUE:
"A Beautiful Mind" appears to be a breakout film from the standpoint that heretofore no one, especially anyone
in Hollywood, would have thought that a movie about a Nobel laureate mathematics professor at Princeton trapped in the throes
of paranoid schizophrenia would be commercially successful.
Credit has to be given to Director Ron Howard for getting behind this project, but my bet would be that the money to fund
the movie wouldn't have been forthcoming had they not lined up the beefy, but "A List" actor, Russell Crowe, to
play the geek mathematics wiz, John Forbes Nash, Jr.
The Academy loves actors in the depths of mental disintegration, so a safe bet would be for this film to be well-rewarded
when it comes time for the Oscar nominations to be announced. My complaint would be that Crowe already beat out other more
deserving Oscar Best Actor candidates for his role in "The Gladiator," so rewarding him again seems to me to be
overkill. His role in this movie is admittedly much better, but it also seems to me to have that "Look at me, aren't
I Oscar caliber?" appearance written all over it.
I'm not saying that Russell Crowe isn't good in this movie, because he is. However, I would just like to state for the
record that this movie somehow did not move me as much as some others have this year. I was not caught up in the emotions
of the story, and I find it hard to verbalize why. Others have made the same comment, so I know that I am not alone here.
There IS one standout actor in this movie, and that is the fiery Jennifer Connelly as the beautiful physics student who
goes on to woo and to win the shy and socially inept Nash for her husband and then fights for her dignity and his life as
she watches him mentally disintegrate.
Alicia Nash also expresses great faith and love and loyalty in allowing him use his extraordinary mental abilities to
find his own personal solution for schizophrenia. She could have signed him away to a mental institution, but he pleaded with
her to be allowed to cure himself without drugs, which impaired his mental faculties to such a degree as to make them virtually
inoperable.
It is a great leap of faith and love that she allowed this to happen,
especially with a young child around the house who would also be in danger. As the only sane person always around, Jennifer
Connelly as Alicia Nash is the glue that ties this movie together as a love story as well as a healing story, and credit has
to be given to her for carrying that burden beautifully.
"A Beautiful Mind" is a beautiful movie, but it is not an exceptional movie. I was expecting it to fill out
my Top 10 List for 2001, but now I will have to look elsewhere. A wonderful concept capably brought to fruition in a movie
that somehow is about as cool and as impersonal as the science of mathematics. In the rush of good and great movies at the
end of 2001 and the start of 2002, go see this one if you love Crowe or have only junk showing in the rest of your local cinema
multiplexes.
MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
I have already given away much of the story above, so let's go back to the beginning where a young John Nash comes to
Princeton University from West Virginia as a gifted student to work for his doctorate degree. He is so smart that class work
doesn't interest him, so he stays in the school library and writes mathematical equations on the library's leaded-glass windows.
He has very few friends other than his roommate, Charles (Paul Bettany), as he is a social misfit of the first order.
About to be given the boot for classroom nonattendance and the lack of a creditable doctoral thesis, Nash suddenly develops
the economics of game theory (in a bar while assessing his and his friends' chances of success at scoring with a beautiful
blonde and her friends, the movie would have us believe!). This novel game theory flies in the face of 150 years of Adam Smith's
landmark treatise on "The Wealth of Nations," which suggests that each individual's selfish pursuit of his needs
benefits society as a whole.
This remarkable work on his part gets him invited down to the Pentagon to work on cryptography during the height of the
Cold War with the U.S.S.R. He is brilliantly able to break down the code just by looking at it, but we as viewers never know
whether or not this, in fact, actually happened. By now Nash has populated his own parallel universe of unseen people out
to solicit his special area of expertise for their own special needs.
There is Charles, his old roommate from the Princeton days, who is always around, later with his lovely young little niece,
to cheer him on in his code-breaking work. Then there is the mysterious William Parcher (Ed Harris), who ostensibly is the
head of a top secret black bag government operation working out of M.I.T. Parcher hires Nash to look for Russian moles sending
each other coded messages in the popular periodicals of the day like Look and Life Magazines.
And then there is the terrifying Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer), who comes out of nowhere to abduct Nash from a seminar
at Harvard University. He successfully absconds with Nash and secretes him away to a psychiatric hospital. Is he a good guy
or is he one of the many Soviet agent enemies that Nash has mentally manufactured for himself? Or are the agents real too?
It takes both Nash and the viewer some time to figure all this out. I won't describe the rest of this story, but the movie
spans over 50 years of Nash's life (and Crowe ages appropriately) to shortly after he wins the Nobel Prize for Mathematics
in 1994 for his game theory developed some 40 years before.
|
