Jan. 7, 2001 – If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, "A Beautiful Mind" must be just that much more terrible a thing to lose.
That is what happened to real-life mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe), who made an astonishing discovery early on in his career, earning him international acclaim, only subsequently to fall heir to schizophrenia.
Under what one critic calls the "clean, forceful" direction of Ron Howard, the movie traces a 50-year span of Nash's life, from his days as an arrogant Princeton student in 1947 through his decent into a horrific madness — and then back up again to claim the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economic Science.
Russell Crowe comes into his own, making a seamless change from his Charleton Heston-esque "Gladiator" to the troubled Nash, in what Metromix.com reviewer Michael Wilmington calls an "amazingly complete performance from an arrogant young genius to a melancholy, vulnerable old man, shambling across the campus trying to keep his demons at bay."
Nash marries Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a brilliant physics student he meets at MIT, where he is teaching — and where he also meets a shadowy government agent (Ed Harris), who recruits him for a top-secret government job. Alicia, who loves Nash's mind, sticks by him through his disintegration.
Wilmington found the movie "surprisingly scary in its evocation of Nash's private terrors … and moving when it shows us his bonds with Alicia … but it's not especially accurate in its rendering of his life, even though Sylvia Nasar's book, 'A Beautiful Mind,' is its ostensible source."
The final consensus from the reviewing stand is that it's a worthwhile way to spend two and a half hours. The picture "has both edge and human feeling, tension and warm veins of sympathy," Wilmington writes. "It's an ideal subject for Howard's major virtues: rigorous organization, compassion and an ability to draw believable communities."
The film is rated PG for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence. It is playing at Sunny Isle Theaters.
