An Imperfect Beauty

I've said here on a few occasions that I don't think much of Russell Crowe. On the other hand, I tend to think quite highly of director Ron Howard. These two "forces" have been playing against each other for a while, favoring my distaste, and so I had not seen the Academy Award winning movie, A Beautiful Mind. Not long ago, however, the scales finally tipped in the other direction, and I decided to give the film a chance.

My reaction was similarly mixed. It is, unsurprisingly, a skillfully made movie. The actors give good performances all around (yes, even Crowe), though Jennifer Connelly should be particularly commended. (And Ed Harris, though great, is sadly rather wasted in his unusual and limited role.)

The script is a bit at odds with itself. Mostly, it wants to focus around a particular period in the life of its subject, John Nash; the vast bulk of the action takes place in the span of a few months. But it also wants to be an entire life story, as the first half hour covers his time as a college student, while the final twenty minutes compresses the subsequent four decades of his life.

The "before" is probably necessary, from a narrative standpoint, to show us that the man is in fact a genius, for the main chunk of the movie is going to take us far away from this. The "after" is also necessary, as a sort of redemption of the character, a triumph over his challenges. And yet it isn't put together deftly at all in the writing. When the truly necessary comes off as a time-consuming distraction, something isn't quite clicking with the story.

That said, the movie is very effective in its middle act. There's plenty of drama, plenty of emotion, and a clever reversal that is appropriately hidden from and hinted to the audience at the same time. If the movie were somehow more tightly drawn around these elements, it would be very high on my list indeed. But sandwiched between the stale bread of the awkward opening and closing acts, I rate it a B- overall.

It's still a movie worth seeing, but I think it neither Ron Howard's best effort (that would be Apollo 13), nor the true Best Picture of 2001. (Memento and Moulin Rouge would have to share the honor, likely favoring whichever film I'd watched again more recently.)