A BEAUTIFUL MIND

Above all there is the fierce presence of Mr. Crowe, who refuses every temptation to overact the role set before him. Too often the chance to depict genius or mental disorder is taken, even by gifted actors like Dustin Hoffman (''Rain Man'') and Geoffrey Rush (''Shine''), as a license to show off.




Asked why he believed the wild delusions that characterized his illness,
Mr. Nash replied that it was because they came to him ''the same way that my mathematical ideas did.''



Reviewed by A. O. Scott







Type:
Features

Distributor:
Universal


Starring Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe, Adam Goldberg, Ed Harris, Paul Bettany. Directed by Ron Howard. (PG13, 134 minutes). In transforming the life of the brilliant mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. into a muzzy, triumph-of-the-human-spirit Hollywood movie, Ron Howard and his collaborators have stripped it of anything that might present the audience with the slightest discomfort or reason to think about the documented facts concerning Mr. Nash. On its own terms, though, the movie succeeds in dramatizing Mr. Nash's mental illness and, to a lesser extent, his mathematical insights. Russell Crowe's performance is honest and focused, but the movie's conceptions of intellectual life and human character are ultimately so simplistic, so deeply mistrustful of the audience's intelligence that any chance for genuine insight is squandered. – A. O. Scott, The New York Times

MPAA Rating: PG13 (Mild Violence/Adult Situations/Questionable for Children)




Mr. Crowe, with his superhuman powers of concentration, shows us a man who dwells
almost entirely in an inner world, and he dramatizes that inwardness as if nobody were
watching. A faint smile plays across Nash's mouth, and his speech is whispery and halting,
with a suggestion of the South in its cadences. (Mr. Nash grew up in West Virginia.)
As always with Mr. Crowe, you never feel that these are actorly mannerisms; they
seem instead to arise from a deep absorption in the logic of the character.

In tackling the problem of how to bring us at least partway into Nash's mind,
Mr. Howard has come up with a clever conceit, as simple as it is inspired.
Asked why he believed the wild delusions that characterized his illness,
Mr. Nash replied that it was because they came to him ''the same way that my mathematical ideas did.''

The hallucinations that increasingly plague Nash occupy the same reality as everything else.
Schizophrenia does not announce itself as such to those it afflicts. Mr. Howard leads us into its
infernal reality without posting a sign on the door, and the character's way out of it seems at
least metaphorically true to the real Mr. Nash's account of his remission. ''I began to intellectually
reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my
orientation,'' Mr. Nash wrote in a 1994 autobiographical essay.


Above all there is the fierce presence of Mr. Crowe, who refuses every temptation to overact
the role set before him. Too often the chance to depict genius or mental disorder is taken, even by gifted actors
like Dustin Hoffman (''Rain Man'') and Geoffrey Rush (''Shine''), as a license to show off.