Beautiful Mind
After his Academy Award win for Best Actor in 2000, Russell Crowe was seemingly on top of the world having garnered his Oscar for Gladiator, a grade A movie for men where he played a pure alpha male warrior in a violent, bloodshed filled environment. Crowe would then famously state that he was capable of playing any kind of role and would prove that the next year with this followup performance, winning all the award circuit trophies but coming up short of a second consecutive Oscar win although Ron Howard would get his first win for directing and the Best Picture award would also get bestowed upon this film. Crowe would indeed play the opposite of his Maximus character from Gladiator as here he would play John Nash, a real life brilliant and legendary mathematician who came up with various theories that would change the face of world economics forever and enable him to win the Nobel Prize for doing so. Nash was also someone who suffered throughout his life from severe mental illness that was so acute that he had several bouts with paranoid schizophrenic delusions, believing in things that were never real even as others would often notice his tendencies to talk and interact with imaginary figures that simply did not exist in the real world. It is here that the various creative choices by Howard as director are the only things that can be called into question: the movie is woefully inaccurate, ignoring certain elements of Nash’s life that might have been considered inappropriate for the subject matter such as Nash’s homosexuality or his having had a child out of wedlock prior to the events of this film, but the most serious issue is Howard’s decision to brush aside Nash’s mathematics achievements (although how interesting the movie would have been if that had been the focus of the story is debatable) and instead just do a full blown examination of the effects of Nash’s mental instability, so much so that the movie could very well have been renamed A Beautiful Madness. In doing so, Howard turns whole entire sections of the film into either a spy movie, an action thriller or a horror movie. The irony becomes readily apparent late in the film when Nash returns to his alma mater Princeton University and is treated with such reverence and awe while the viewer has little to no idea why except that he came up with some good math theories or something. The movie chooses to go all in on the psychotic hallucinations angle, so much so that it even fails to get that right as the real Nash himself only ever admitted to having had auditory hallucinations (hearing voices) while here he is given a whole mini cast of characters out in full view and plain sight to provide aid, comfort or sometimes even fear. Even worse is the fact that Howard sets up these various characters and situations (including a car chase and shootout) as being real only saving the truth for the shocked viewer in the form of a plot twist about halfway through the story. Does any of this in any way diminish Crowe’s performance? Absolutely not, as Crowe gives a wonderfully understated portrayal here of a socially awkward, mentally brilliant savant, one which avoids many of the familiar pitfalls associated with cinematic renderings of lunacy and just makes his Nash a painfully ill HUMAN BEING, someone who somehow managed to pull things together thanks to the love and grace of his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly in the role that got her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar) even as the film ignores the real life development that The Nashes actually divorced in the 1970s due to Alicia becoming so overwhelmed by her husband’s issues only for them to remarry over 20 years later and eventually die together tragically in a car wreck in 2015. But here Connelly’s Alicia (despite her stated doubts about wanting to remain in the marriage) becomes her husband’s rock and ultimately, his true savior as they work together to first understand who the imaginary people are whom he sees and then to counsel him to overcome it all and actually want to be reconnected to the real world. Nash states early on that he doesn’t like people very much which may explain the nature of the imaginary characters and their personalities and also in the fact that their alternating shifts between being both nurturing and demanding is something that has genuinely sprung from his own antisocial ID i.e., they’re the type of people whom he would LIKE to know and thus he created them himself as an alternative to the more snooty, academic types that he’s seen on campus. Even as the film goes off on long tangents depicting Nash having been “recruited” by the Pentagon to crack Russian communist codes hidden within The New York Times while Howard milks the (seemingly real) espionage / spy elements for all they’re worth, we do see that at least one trip to the Pentagon to help decipher some codes was a real occurrence before the deep end is breached storywise. But it is Crowe and Connelly’s love story that really matters here as every time she comes onscreen, she succeeds in bringing things back down to Earth just as much for the viewer as she does for her husband and Crowe manages to elicit equal amounts of pathos and likable eccentricity while both are supported by a more than capable cast that includes Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Josh Lucas, Anthony Rapp, Austin Pendleton and Judd Hirsch. Even if many of the elements are counterfeit compared to the real thing, the acting from the two main stars does add up overall to being quite an emotional experience, something that doesn’t always happen these days even as Nash himself would tell people that while he liked the movie a lot, “it wasn’t me”…
8/10