Crowe is stunning as tortured genius in 'A Beautiful Mind'

As a biography of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., "A Beautiful Mind" leaves much to be desired. It casually omits vital aspects of his character and communicates almost nothing about his numerous mathematical accomplishments.

MOVIE REVIEW

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

DIRECTOR: Ron Howard

CAST: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly,

Christopher Plummer

RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence

WHERE: Pacific Place

GRADE: B+

But, to be fair, the filmmakers have gone out of their way to claim that their film is only "inspired" by Nash's life, and that their goal is less biographical authenticity than an unusual (and largely fictionalized) survival story set inside a great but troubled mind.

As such, the film is much more successful. It's an absorbing, progressively unsettling and ultimately very inspiring biographical reflection that, in the interest of creating its subject's internal landscape, plays some chilling tricks on its audience.

It's also another impressive vehicle for the talents of Russell Crowe, giving him the opportunity to put his unique stamp on a kind of character that is very difficult for an actor to convey, and which movies usually avoid like the plague: a man of intellect.

Loosely based on Sylvia Nasar's biography, the film opens in 1947, with Nash a cheerfully anti-social graduate student at Princeton, going through various problems with his peers, and eventually making his name with a brilliant paper on "game theory."

Cut to 1953 and Nash is an M.I.T. professor whose gifts have inspired the Pentagon and one particular government agent (Ed Harris) to enlist him in the front lines of the Cold War -- specifically, to decipher the code by which the Soviets communicate with their spies in the United States.

Before long, he also falls in love with one of his students (Jennifer Connelly), gets married and has a son. But his shadowy and top-secret work for the government increasingly takes over his life, and he becomes intensely paranoid.


		UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
	John Forbes Nash Jr. (Russell Crowe) gradually gets caught up in his own paranoid delusions.

Gradually, he has a complete mental breakdown and the rest of the movie chronicles his internal and external struggle with the delusions of schizophrenia while trying to keep his family together and continue to do creative work in the field of higher mathematics.

The feat of Akiva Goldsman's screenplay and Ron Howard's direction is that it communicates the full horror of living in a world in which one's hallucinations are as "real" as reality, and even knowing they are "not real" somehow doesn't lessen their hold.

In its best moments, the film also is a touching love story, thanks to Connelly's resourceful performance as the long-suffering but determined Mrs. Nash, and an inspiring saga of survival, as Nash learns to deal with his impossible handicap and go on with his life.

As Nash, Crowe could hardly be more convincing. With just the right touch of a West Virginia drawl and a way of wonderfully underplaying his more emotional scenes, he creates a character of true nobility -- as devastatingly imperiled and subtly heroic as any gladiator.