Since the film’s Dec. 21 release, “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Russell Crowe, has been marked as a likely candidate for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations. Awards should most certainly follow the talent that pours from this movie.
Crowe, last year’s Best Actor winner for his performance in “Gladiator,” offers an equally powerful performance in this Ron Howard flick.
The film is based on the real life of John Forbes Nash Jr. (played by Crowe), who won the Nobel Prize for his game theory of economics. The brilliant mathematician, now in his late 70s, started out as a graduate student at Princeton who was isolated from his peers by his intelligence and unfriendly personality.
Howard uses Akiva Goldsman’s script to detail the world inside Nash’s head that he imagines as he ages over time. This biography/drama details Nash’s marital struggles with his wife (played by Jennifer Connelly) and his recovery from paranoid schizophrenia.
Along the way, the viewer becomes so taken in by Nash’s schizophrenic creations — three principle characters he invents — that they become accepted. The characters, Nash’s outgoing college roommate, a young girl and a secret government agent (played by Ed Harris), are so convincing in their roles that the audience assumes they are completely real. They resist the idea that the characters are not real, as though the real world was lying to them.
The film, based on the 1994 novel by Sylvia Nasar, also stars Christopher Plummer, Paul Bettany and Adam Goldberg in supporting roles.
The story opens in 1947 and ends in 1994. While it may have been easier to represent life in 1994, the film also accurately depicts the costuming and setting of the earlier years. This was made easier by setting the film in locations such as Harvard and Yale universities, which didn’t change much over time.
Howard and his crew mastered the details of houses, cars and clothing of the different time periods. The film’s visual effects also remain true to the coloring used in films of the corresponding time periods, comparable to the coloring in the Golden Globe Award-winning film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
This thought-provoking film also defines the basis of love and commitment. Nash’s wife sticks with him despite his delusions, through a particular type of adversity that showed little hope of recovery .
The accepted cure of the time for paranoid schizophrenia only worsened Nash’s problem. Taking pills made him more of a zombie and useless to his family and those around him. What left people still sitting spellbound through the credits was that Nash defeated his own psychological disorder through his willpower and his own intellect. He was able to figure out that the people he had invented in his mind were not real.
The film, which runs about 130 minutes, is rated PG-13 for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence.