BEAUTIFUL MIND, A

(December 2001, U.S.)

Have you ever unfairly misjudged a movie the first time you saw it? I went to see A BEAUTIFUL MIND when it was released as eagerly as I would have gone to see any Ron Howard film. When it was over, I had concluded that I really hated it. I realized soon after, though, that I may have just been having a bad night at the movie theater due to some idiot sitting near me. By the time I saw the film again a year later on HBO, its value came through to me.

Russell Crowe, in my opinion, has developed into one of our best actors over the last 15 years. His role as John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, who is also a paranoid schizophrenic, is a heartfelt dramatic role for a man who had previously shown us hard action blood and guts in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997) and GLADIATOR (2000). Many of us have likely seen films before that portrayed the mind and experiences of someone suffering from schizophrenia. Howard's film, however, brings across the frightening reality of what is real and what is not. Like anyone else watching the story, I had no reason to think that the characters of Nash's roomate Charles Herman (played by Paul Bettany) and the mysterious William Parcher (played by Ed Harris) were not real people. They seemed real enough, right? To learn later on that they were just deluded fantasies is shocking, to say the least. To learn even later that they could easily resurface when Nash stops taking his required medication is even more chilling.

I can remember around the time of the Academy Awards for 2002, there was all kinds of speculation that the real John Nash was an anti-semitic. Maybe he was and maybe he wasn't. If he actually was, you gotta figure that the man was probably so whacked out of his mind half the time, that he didn't even realize he was being an anti-semitic. Perhaps it was also just a cheap ploy to sway the Oscar vote. Who knows.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND won the Oscar for best picture of 2001.

Favorite line or dialogue:

Dr. Rosen: "You can't reason your way out of this!"
John Nash: "Why not? Why can't I?"
Dr. Rosen: "Because your mind is where the problem is in the first place!"