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I'm ambivalent about A Beautiful Mind. It feels to me a little bit too much like what Hollywood thinks is a good "message" movie. It's a biopic that takes as its subject John Forbes Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose early work on game theory eventually resulted in the award of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. The film picks up with Nash's advent at Princeton University as a cocky young grad student who grew up in West Virginia and is obsessed with making his mark among the other prodigies. It's a nice enough start, but what the picture is really interested in focusing on is the subject of Nash's mental illness.
The movie does a fairly good job conveying the reality of the delusions that a paranoid schizophrenic suffers under; it does so by taking the tack of presenting imaginary people and events as Nash himself sees them--as real. So it's not until the middle of the film or so that the viewer otherwise unfamiliar with Nash's story realizes that he is not, in fact, working on some super-secret counter-intelligence code-breaking team.
Russel Crowe is excellent in his portrayal of the brilliant, obnoxious, troubled Nash. Jennifer Connelly is sympathetic as his wife, trying to cope with the meltdown happening in their lives (the movie entirely glosses over the fact that they were actually divorced after not too many years of marriage). I couldn't escape the feeling that it bogs down somewhat in the middle to late-middle. And I didn't care for the shiny happy Nobel acceptance speech tacked on near the end. In my book, it's a decent movie, a solid piece of work; on the other hand, it's not a great movie, nor is it the best picture of the year.
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