Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001)

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

Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea (2004)

Your Humble Commentator found himself, in the mid-1980s, at a party in Dinkytown, arguing with some guy about who was the greatest actor in Hollywood: Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Tootsie, Rainman) or Robert De Niro (The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy). Today, we think we’re blessed with an even wider array of choices – Kevin Spacey (whose film Beyond the Sea we’re screening tonight), Daniel Day-Lewis, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Don Cheadle all come to mind. In fact, we selected American Beauty, The Usual Suspects, and Beyond the Sea for inclusion in this year’s film series because of what Spacey in particular had made of them.

But is he the greatest? First, this begs the question of the criteria one uses to determine such irrelevancies. Allow us to suggest the following (and we’ll limit ourselves to male actors this time):

Losing oneself in a character – One of the most impressive aspects of watching a great actor is the amazement at seeing him or her completely morph from one role to the next, a “how’d he do that” moment. In 1985, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis made two movies, Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette and James Ivory's Room With a View. In one he played a gay punk London tough, in the other a pretentious uptight Edwardian aristocrat. And you could not tell it was the same actor. Wow.

Consistent greatness over time – this is hard. A lot of actors start well and then flame out or coast on their success (one might put Dustin Hoffman in this category). Others start out as two-dimensional and don’t mature into richer, more nuanced characters until later (Bill Murray comes to mind). Consistent greatness is a true achievement. Here Sean Penn is a great example, from his breakout role in Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to the complex characterization in Tim Robbins' Dead Man Walking (1995) to his most recent tour de force in the biopic Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008). There may be occasional duds, but he’s still got it.

Not falling into type – This is a killer if you’re going to be considered great – you can’t be the same person every time (Tom Cruise, we’re looking at you). You can’t make every character into you; you have to make yourself into the character. And you have to take risks with your audience’s and fans’ expectations. Is there a more experimental actor in Hollywood than Johnny Depp? You might think that his consistent choice of idiosyncratic literary characters – Hunter S. Thompson, Willy Wonka, Jack Sparrow, Ichabod Crane, Don Juan, James Barrie, The Mad Hatter – amounts to self-typing, but he’s too adventurous to let any one of those resemble another. Nor does a concern about his star status seem to affect his choices. In 2010: Tonto?

Making a lot out of a little – We love it when an actor doesn’t have a starring or major role and still makes a quality impression. We would go see any movie with Don Cheadle even if he was only on screen for a matter of minutes; he brings so many smaller characters to life: overconfident ex-con Maurice Miller in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), naively hopeful Buck Swope in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997), unintelligible Basher Tarr in Soderbergh's remake of Oceans 11 (2001), and corrupt Haitian official Henri Moore in Brett Ratner's otherwise forgettable heist film After the Sunset (2004).

So, given these criteria, how does Kevin Spacey stack up? Well, we’re going to leave that up to you. Suffice it to say, Spacey has assembled a body of work with which one can begin to make these sort of distinctions. He began his career with small but notable turns in films like Working Girl, Henry and June, and Glengarry Glen Ross. If you take Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) as his first great film and run your finger down the list to what you consider his most recent superior work, do you cross into a second decade? Has he begun to coast? What about variety of roles? Are his characters distinct from one another? Does he take risks?

It’s hard to judge an actor on the basis of just three films, which is what Film Club limited itself to in selecting the stand-out works of Kevin Spacey, but we’re pretty impressed with the three we chose. And we leave it up to you, as you watch Spacey morph into 1950s and ‘60s singer and teen idol Bobby Darin in this musical biopic, to place Spacey in that pantheon of current great male actors. One more question: Does Spacey’s decision to use his own singing voice, as Joaquin Phoenix did in James Mangold's Walk the Line, move him up or down your list?

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser