Nominated for eight Academy Awards, and winner of four Oscars including Best Picture, A Beautiful Mind is one of the foremost dramas of this millennium. The creation of director Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind debuted to widespread serious approval due to the depth of its screenplay (by Akiva Goldsman from a book by Sylvia Nasar), the brilliant performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, and the in-depth portrayal of a victim of mental illness.
Russell Crowe's follow-up performance to blockbuster hits such as, LA Confidential and Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind is an astonishing trip into one man's delusional reality. As a mathematical genius, John Nash (Russell Crowe) enjoys the early achievement of a promising profession in academia. Able to solve mathematical theories that stump many of the greatest minds of his time, Nash’s true problem arises because of his mental illness. The reality in which he lives does not exist, and it threatens to tear apart his marriage, his career, and the very life which he holds dear. Crowe's one-of-a-kind depiction of the schizophrenic Nash and the beautiful Jennifer Connelly's performance as the woman who loves him are both complex, bolstered by an onscreen chemistry between Crowe and Connelly. Crowe especially is adept at revealing the many onion-like layers that Nash creates for all aspects of his life.
The cast and crew of A Beautiful Mind allow us to see a whole new world through the eyes of suffering genius. And Ron Howard has crafted an absorbing film which effectively blends the lines between the world in John Nash's mind and the real world, A Beautiful Mind eloquently depicts one man's struggle against enormous odds. As Nash's paranoia and figments of imagination join together to conceal the genius of Nash’s beautiful mind, the power of the human spirit rallies to great heights in this inspiring film, arguably one of the best films of the decade.
Billy Lutz
SPA Film Club
A Beautiful Mind falls into the honorable category of “biopic,” a film that tells the life story of a real person, emphasizing the facts. That’s not to say that biopic film-makers don’t bend a few realities in the name of dramatic narrative, but this is as close as Hollywood gets to non-fiction without being a documentary. Biopics earn respect in the industry, too. They challenge actors and give film-goers access to historical figures without turning the experience into lecture. Think of the recent or great biopics you might have seen: Gandhi (starring Ben Kingsley), X (Denzel Washington as Malcolm X), Ali (Will Smith), Frida (Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo), Ray (Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles), Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin), Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash), The Queen (Helen Mirren), Milk (Sean Penn) or Invictus (Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela). Many of these have been nominated for Academy Awards and often the actor won or was nominated as well. But how respectful are these sorts of films of the history they represent?
Tonight’s film takes us through the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a mathematical genius who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. When the film came out, an argument ensued over screenwriter Goldsman’s somewhat cavalier use of his source material. Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the book, claimed Goldsman left out important parts of Nash’s life and fictionalized others. This is always the tension with major film biopics – the desire to both entertain and inform, to make a good story out of real life. Typically, we find that Hollywood will bend truth in order to provide entertainment, and so as we watch A Beautiful Mind, it’s important to keep in mind that the reality may not be exactly as it appears on the screen. Perhaps A Beautiful Mind, about a mathematician who has delusions, is our own delusion – we think we see John Forbes Nash, but we really just see Russell Crowe as a character that reflects a few of the moments of his life.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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