Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. A Beautiful Mind is the seventy-fourth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. **This review contains spoilers, if you would like not to be spoiled for a 24 year old film, please watch A Beautiful Mind first How far can a gimmick take a film? Plenty of directors have made a career out of big twists and misdirection. But how much weight can a shock hold in evaluating the effectiveness of a movie? As evidenced by its Best Picture win in 2002, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind supposes that a surprising hook can take you all the way to the top. John Nash (Russell Crowe) is brilliant but socially awkward student of mathematics at Princeton. He seems to see the patterns in equations as if the leap off the page in a flash of light. While his classmates socialize and find success in publishing their research, John struggles to truly make his mark. With the encouragement of his zany roommate (Paul Bettany,) John finally makes a breakthrough in game theory that catapults him to the top of the mathematics world. He begins breaking codes for the government and working with a mysterious FBI agent (Ed Harris) to stop the Russians from deploying a nuclear weapon in the US. The problem for John is that — as the film reveals in shocking manner — his roommate and FBI handler are not real. Both men are visual and auditory hallucinations brought on by undiagnosed schizophrenia. The disorder allowed him to see patterns that made him a brilliant mathematician, but now the paranoia begins to risk his relationship with his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly.) Howard’s biopic takes significant liberties with the real life Nash for dramatic effect, decisions that turn the film into something that only vaguely resembles a biography. His hallucinations — which in real life were only auditory — are carefully plotted to not interact with any real character. If you know what’s coming it actually is a clever bit of staging that telegraphs these people aren’t real without screaming it to people who haven’t been spoiled yet. The effect is double edged though. Aside from using a mental diagnosis as a plot device, knowing that what Nash is experiencing is a delusion removes a great deal of the film’s dramatic thrust. When you know that our hero is not truly carrying out secretive state missions it undermines the tension but also the depiction of his genuine genius as the patterns he deciphers become indistinguishable from his hallucinations. There is no avoiding the fact that the shocking reveal of Nash’s diagnosis is the cornerstone of A Beautiful Mind. On an initial viewing it comes out of the blue and is the memorable moment that re-contextualizes the whole film. That experience certainly must have weighed on voters in the year it won Best Picture, because the rest of the film struggles to live up to it. Crowe’s performance as Nash is fine, he never betrays the diagnosis because he skillfully plays into how real every experience was for his character. All the rest falls somewhat flat. Bettany and Harris’s characters intentionally have very little depth to them, but still they occupy a great deal of the plot. Howard brings a lot of flourishes to represent the process of Nash’s mind that feel over the top and out of sync with the tone otherwise. Then there’s the aging makeup which is well done for Crowe and not quite so convincing for the people around him. All that to say, stripped away from the gimmicky way in which A Beautiful Mind approaches its subjects mental health, the film is a mediocre biopic without much to say. Had it not been for the element of surprise catching audiences, would it still have reached the heights it did? I’m not so sure and watching for a second time, knowing what was going to happen, I found a lot of the film uninspiring. 6/10
Comments
|