Starring: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg
Directed
By: Ron Howard
In
"A Beautiful Mind," Russell Crowe plays a schizophrenic
Nobel Prize-winning mathematician ó and, though the role might seem a real
stretch for an actor who just won an Oscar for his Charlton Heston turn
as Maximus in "Gladiator," he and the movie ace the test.
Crowe is eerily, touchingly convincing as John Forbes Nash, a real-life mathematics genius who made a revolutionary breakthrough in game theory (which explains economic relationships) as a Princeton student but later suffered a violent breakdown, derailing his brilliant career and making chaos of his marriage and life.
The movie, directed by Ron Howard ó in a real turnabout from last year's "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas" ó is unsparing and exhaustive in its dramatization of Nash's rise, fall and rise. Spanning almost 50 years, it shows Nash's early triumphs, his descent into a delusional hell and his inspiring recovery, beginning with his arrival at Princeton as a cocky West Virginia math whiz in 1947 and climaxing with his 1994 Nobel Prize.
During that half-century journey, we meet Nash's fellow students, rivals and friends ó such as stalwart Sol (Adam Goldberg) and his bizarre, mercurial roommate Charles Herman (Paul Bettany) ó his mentor Prof. Helinger (Judd Hirsch), his doctor Rosen (Christopher Plummer) as well as mysterious, tight-lipped government agent William Parcher (Ed Harris). Most affectingly, we come to know his gutsy wife, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a brainy campus belle forced to go into the fire with her tortured husband.
Playing this demanding part, Crowe gives an amazingly complete performance. He convinces us that he's an arrogant young genius, and he's also believable as a melancholy, vulnerable old man, shambling across the campus, trying to keep his demons at bay. The movie is surprisingly scary in its evocation of Nash's private terrors, and it's very moving when it shows us his bonds with Alicia and his battles to hold onto his disintegrating life. But it's not especially accurate in its rendering of his life ó even though Sylvia Nasar's book, "A Beautiful Mind," is the ostensible source.
It may even have a personal vein as well. Wouldn't a prodigious young child actor like Ronny Howard of "The Andy Griffith Show" have been familiar with the perils of early fame and brilliance, of being "different?" Didn't he, like Nash, have to somehow create or retreat into worlds of his own? Howard actually may have a unique take on one of the movie's principal themes: the sometimes terrifying workings of imagination.
But "A Beautiful Mind" is also a movie about how families can save lives: a consistent theme of Howard's movies and one he develops here without damaging sentimentality or sugary formulas. It's also a movie about great intelligence: how it can ennoble and alienate those who possess it. Movies about intellectuals often fail because the life of the mind is so much harder to dramatize than the life of the senses or of the man of action. But "A Beautiful Mind" ó scarily, movingly, beautifully ó bridges that gap. It shows us the joys and terrors of seeing things that others can't.
Review: (Michael Wilmington)
5 stars out of 5