Crowe masterful in ‘Beautiful Mind’

Max Jacobson

Friday, Dec. 28, 2001 | 9:51 a.m.

Genius is a pitifully overused word in modern times. But its true nature, while elusive, usually relates to people who see the universe in ways that no one before them has, and whose observations change ordinary people's lives in profound ways.

"A Beautiful Mind" is a moving chronicle of events in the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., a West Virginia mathematician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1994. Nash's Equilibrium was a pioneering advance in economics that contradicted theories that had been accepted as doctrine for more than 150 years.

The film spans a period beginning during Nash's years at Princeton University during the late '40s, when he was a brash graduate student hungry to make his mark, continuing into his middle years, a life dominated by mental illness, and ending in Stockholm, Sweden, at his ultimate triumph as one of the most unlikely Nobel recipients of the 20th century.

Through it all, Russell Crowe carries the film on his Protean broad shoulders. Crowe is, simply stated, the best actor in films today. Yes, his stilted attempt at a West Virginia accent has holes in it, but since much of this role is nonverbal, he excels in it.

Equally impressive, in the role of the mathematician's wife, Alicia, is Jennifer Connelly. The long-suffering wife role is generally a thankless cliche, but Connelly rises to new heights in a sensitive, modulated performance that is almost certain to win her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Princeton in the late '40s has a Norman Rockwell feel (thanks to a terrific production design by Wynn Thomas). Tension is high among the young scholars on campus, which include Nash's rival Hansen (Josh Lucas) and his sympathetic admirer Sol (Adam Goldberg). At first, Nash comes across as monomaniacal in his quest to make a research breakthrough.

"I don't much like people," he says, "and they don't much like me." But then his mysterious, hedonistic roommate Charles (Paul Bettany) forces him to loosen up.

Just as Nash seems ready to crack, he has a revelation while trying to pick up a girl in a bar with friends. Soon after, he is seen obsessively writing mathematical equations on paper, chalkboards, library windows and whatever else happens to be in front of him. Nash eventually finishes his proof, "the achievement of a lifetime."

Cut to six years later, and Nash is ensconced at MIT's Wheeler Labs, doing sensitive post-war work and courting the beautiful, brilliant woman who is soon to become his wife. After a gentle courtship, Nash marries Alicia and fathers a child about the same time that the ominous government agent William Parcher (a powerful Ed Harris) appears.

What follows next is a harrowing series of events that result in Nash's descent into madness, a 30-year bout with schizophrenia. It's always clear to the audience that Nash treads the notoriously thin line between genius and madness, but to psychiatrists such as Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer), it is a line that is usually crossed in one direction.

Through this ordeal, Alicia sticks by her husband, and if the film ever sags, it is in these sequences, because director Ron Howard ("Apollo 13," "Parenthood") has a tendency to go for the slick and sentimental. What really jars you from your seat, though, is the sheer barbarism that was then used to treat mental illness. Drugs such as Risperadone, which today can make a schizophrenic's life nearly normal, did not exist in the '50s, and the ways in which medical science dealt with those patients were literally and figuratively shocking.

You'd stop short of calling this a feel-good movie. But the last scene can move a typical audience member to tears, and the story again reveals the triumph of the human spirit and the power of love, two of the most basic themes in film. The penetrating, pulsating score is by James Horner ("Titanic"), the most prolific, talented composer in movies in many decades and, similar to Crowe, he towers atop his profession.

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