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Reviewed by Ivana Redwine
Length: 134 minutes Winner of four Academy Awards including Best Picture, "A Beautiful Mind" is a biopic about gifted, but troubled, math genius John Nash. The movie stars Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. The film's other two Oscars went to Ron Howard in the Best Director category and Akiva Goldsman for Best Adapted Screenplay. When I watched "A Beautiful Mind" at home on DVD, and for me the film played much better on the small screen than it did when I saw it during its theatrical release. The DVD version is a two-disc set that comes loaded with extras, including separate commentary tracks for the director and the screenwriter. The film opens in the late 1940s at Princeton, where John Nash (Russell Crowe) is a young graduate student in mathematics. There Nash does some brilliant original work, but its importance is not immediately widely recognized. In the early 1950s Nash takes a job at M.I.T. that involves both working at the (fictional) Wheeler Defense Labs and teaching classes. At M.I.T. he falls in love with and marries a physics student named Alicia (Jennifer Connelly). However, Nash's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, and he is diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. With Alicia's help, he battles mental illness for many years, and eventually recovers sufficiently to live a more or less normal life. Meanwhile, the importance of the work he did four decades earlier receives wide recognition, and in 1994 Nash is awarded a Nobel Prize. The presence of Russell Crowe dominates the movie, and I think his portrayal of John Nash is the film's biggest asset. Jennifer Connelly is also quite good as Nash's loving and supportive wife-my only complaint is that I wish her role had been bigger and more complex. I liked the performances of the actors in the other supporting roles as well, particularly Ed Harris, who plays a mysterious U.S. government undercover agent. There are two things that director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman did in the film that I really admire. One is the way they found to show the audience the delusions and paranoia suffered by a schizophrenic. The other is how they were able to illustrate the essence of Nash's Nobel-winning mathematical idea in terms of guys trying to pick up girls in a bar. While there are a lot of things I like about "A Beautiful Mind," there is one big thing about it I hate: The filmmakers didn't trust their audience. After seeing it in the theater, I recall saying to my companion on the way out, "That movie seemed too tidy to me." I guess I was expecting a richly textured character study that spoke to me about real life. Instead, I got a slick, sentimental, comforting movie where most of the incidents have a cooked-up feel to them. After seeing "A Beautiful Mind," I looked at Sylvia Nasar's acclaimed biography of the same name, and it appears to me the film takes very little from the book except its title. It seems to me that, unlike Nasar, the filmmakers weren't concerned with depicting the actual details of Nash's messy life; instead they selected a few key episodes, tweaked them to suit their purposes, and constructed an allegory around them. Now, after repeated viewings of the movie on DVD, I've come to accept it as a fable loosely inspired by Nash's life, and on that basis, I like it pretty well. The "A Beautiful Mind" DVD set contains two feature-length commentary tracks, one by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and the other by director Ron Howard, and both are worthwhile. By the way, if you're still thinking of Howard as the young actor on "The Andy Griffith Show" or "Happy Days," you may be surprised at how articulate he is about everything, including Nash's mathematical ideas. I also liked Howard's commentary on the deleted scenes, which run for about 26 minutes. Disc Two of the DVD set is packed with extras, most of them short. I particularly recommend "Creation of the Special Effects" to see how subtly the film uses special effects in service of story instead of so viewers can exclaim, "Wow, look at those special effects!" I also enjoyed the special feature titled "Meeting John Nash," where Ron Howard visits the great mathematician. Another feature contains interesting footage of the pomp and circumstance of the actual Stockholm ceremony where Nash received his Nobel. I hated the feature "A Beautiful Partnership: Ron Howard and Brian Grazer," finding the conversation between director and producer neither entertaining nor informative. The DVD set also contains some other bonus materials, most of which are listed below. Selected Special Features on the DVDs:
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