A Beautiful Mind is an extremely uneven movie from an extremely uneven director. I found it entertaining and often interesting, but there is a lot that simply doesn't work. I'm not sure I could adequately defend any possible attacks against it either. It's distressing to know that it won the 2001 Oscar over the far more exciting In the Bedroom and Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, but not as reprehensible a thought as having Russell Crowe's aggressively stupid Gladiator win over Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. Knowing that its closest runner-up was the hollow and heartless Moulin Rouge, I sort of viewed the 2001 Best Picture Oscar race the same way I viewed the last presidential race: with equal parts fear, derision and indifference. Neither candidate is really that bad and neither candidate adequately represents me.

Ron Howard's filmography is a curious thing. He tried to do the violent thriller thing with Ransom and the results were embarrassing; it seemed like a violent thriller made by someone who doesn't usually make violent thrillers. He did the dark Gilliam/Jeunet fantasy thing with The Grinch, and the results were bizarre and heartlessly amoral, but not entirely disinteresting. His Cocoon is simply unwatchable, and there isn't really anything that spectacular about his Willow. I did greatly admire his Apollo 13 however. It is an adequate challenge to Ridley Scott's Alien in establishing the cold emptiness of space. I remember liking Parenthood, which despite the cheeriness of its ending was really quite distressing. Generally, there isn't a whole lot that ties Ron Howard's films together. You can't really find any unity of themes in his films. You can't really find anything really personal either. He seems to tie a blindfold over his eyes and throw darts on a dartboard to establish what his next project is going to be. As hard as I try to think otherwise, “Directed by Ron Howard” is beginning to be a meaningless phrase.

His contribution to A Beautiful Mind isn't an entirely unintelligent one. He understands Jennifer Connelly and Russell Crowe, and their contribution to the film. They both carry an air of "suave" and "sophisticated" that meshes well with the '40s/'50s-period decor. Howard preserves this feeling very well. A bit of real vulgarity would sink the film, but Howard keeps all the real vulgarity out. The tuxedos stay black and never turn orange. Howard shows… restraint may not be quite the right word, although it's getting there, how about respect? A Beautiful Mind really is as far away from The Grinch as a film could be. The moment that I realized that I was enjoying this film was during a car chase between Crowe and a double agent and some Russian spies. The score doesn't attempt to make it thrilling or exciting exactly. It sounds tentative and slightly mournful. The chase is just something that happens.

The double agents are all hallucinations. We don't have much of a problem accepting them as either double agents OR hallucinations. He looks awfully sane when we see them, and awfully insane when we don't. There is of course a very fine line to be drawn here. If Nash were to see talking scarecrows or flying monkeys we would be moving in a very different direction. The film works in no small part because Nash's hallucinations seem fairly reasonable. There has been some criticism that the film does not mention Nash's anti-Semitism, bisexuality, a molestation charge or his illegitimate child. If it were to include these aspects we would have a very different movie on our hands. These are loaded topics for a film, and in including them, we would quickly lose our ability to relate and sympathize with him. Especially if these things were caused or influenced by his schizophrenia. A Beautiful Mind's sterile slickness is what works the best in it. A bisexual, anti-Semitic John Nash would ruin the film's quietly cool aesthetic.

Is it reprehensible that the film sanitizes John Nash? Perhaps. We have to understand, however, that film is only as good as the emotional reactions that it provokes and the psychological truths that it taps into. Art is different than journalism, you know. We aren't interested in facts, but in impressions, attitudes and perceptions. "John Nash is not a household name," argues Ron Howard. Were he to be a household name, A Beautiful Mind's treatment may not have played as well. For whatever reason though, the cleaned-up John Nash works very well. The reasons for using a cleaned-up version I suppose aren't as dishonorable or insulting as like U-571's. Perhaps it's because U-571 credits the U.S. for all the stuff that the British did; it dishonors the British. A Beautiful Mind simply misrepresents Nash's character and doesn't as much rewrite his actions. Innocent people aren't being dragged along in the film's revisionism. I suppose we have the molestation (or was it an indecent exposure charge? My sources differ on this point) or his illegitimate child, neither of which does the film mention. But that molestation hasn't been as talked about as much as his homosexuality and anti-Semitism (which are relatively meaningless character traits and not actions), and there certainly seems to be a question about what exactly happened there. Homosexuality and anti-Semitism are essentially ideas, emotions and feelings. They aren't really crimes with victims.

To put this in a sort of different perspective: I don't much mind that Tim Burton's Ed Wood glosses over Wood's writing of pornography. So he was a seedy pornographer and it didn't come out in the film, not that big of a deal. But I would mind if Richard Attenborough or someone made a movie about Fatty Arbuckle and made no mention of the Coke bottle rape. It's worse to deny victims victimhood than to deny criminals their criminality. This is a general rule that both filmmakers and the media need to remember. At best I would have to say that my feelings towards the morality of A Beautiful Mind are rather mixed. I will report that the version of Nash's life that we do receive is functional and interesting in its own way. A different film could have been made while staying truthful to the real Nash. Would it be better or more satisfying? It very well could. Would it be more sensationalistic and shallow? That very well could happen as well.

The Beautiful Mind that we get is very agreeable and chillingly smooth. It bears a superficial resemblance to Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, not only in its setting but also in the fact that everyone in the film is educated and grown up and generally speaks like they are educated and grown up. Gattaca was a sort of somber retelling of Brave New World, their highly controlled universe functioning like a well-oiled machine. One gets that impression through A Beautiful Mind. Even the chaotic car chases seem to have some sort of final destination. The film's style is appropriate in representing Nash of course. Nash's specialty is in finding patterns and order in what seems to be disorder. Since much of what we see in the film takes place through his point of view, it makes sense that he will try to make logic out of disjointed hallucinations. The film plays sort of like Pi in reverse.

A Beautiful Mind doesn't really look very hard into this idea of knowing the unknowable. Nash casually knows that the universe is finite, argues that the game of Go is flawed as his perfect play resulted him in losing, and says stuff like "I would gladly continue doing platonic things as is the custom, but in truth all I really want is to have intercourse with you." He fights schizophrenia in the only way that he knows how, through rational means. By ignoring the characters that he has hallucinated. Nash is the ultimate Vulcan. He has subdued his spiritual self and all else that is unknowable and immaterial, because he is unable to adequately control it. What Nash finds the most distressing about his schizophrenia is the chemical solutions for it. The pills he takes make him complacent and inhibit his mathematical genius. He becomes impotent, the final straw in his decay as a man, and following that a human being. He quits the pills and more or less defeats schizophrenia through his will. This aspect of the film is what disturbs mental health advocacy groups the most, and is one that the film is unfortunately too cowardly to acknowledge but dishonest enough to exploit. The film would not be as "inspirational" if it was about a man who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and then took his pills, making everything fine again. The problem with this model is that Nash is disempowered and made into a problem with a simple solution. With the emphasis on will and not antipsychotic drugs, Nash fights the odds and accomplishes something.

The film messes things up though with a mention of him using newer medications. For one, this isn't true to life. For two, the fact that this wasn't true to life is essential in developing the good feelings of the film. The film's ending is schmaltzy, having Nash say he wouldn't have been able to get here without the help of his friends and wife and that he understands that there are things that he won't be able to predict or be able to categorize: like love. No no no no. Nash beat schizophrenia by himself. I suppose people gave him some breaks, but it was him, his will that finally beat it. That's why it so inspiring, remember? He didn't have any help from God or the power of love. Wasn't it Euripides who said, "Gods destroy whom they first make mad?" or something like that? Nash's schizophrenia was not a punishment from God for his arrogance, and was not relieved when he was humbled. As a matter of fact Nash exists outside of God. His triumph over schizophrenia is uniquely his own. Do the people who find A Beautiful Mind an inspirational film understand that Nash was able to triumph because he thought he could? That his triumph is significant in that he had broken down the unanswerable problem of schizophrenia? That in order for him to triumph he has to not develop as a character, and attack schizophrenia solely through the will? I'm not sure that they do.

Jennifer Connelly, as Nash's wife, more or less/kind of sort of makes the film. I'm not convinced that Connelly is really a great actress. People thought that she was incredible in Requiem For A Dream and even in watching that film, I'm not quite sure I saw whatever it is that makes her so great. After seeing the trailer for Waking the Dead, I report that she really does resemble a human being. Otherwise she seems beautiful and passive. She is, I'm afraid, very much cheesecake. It has seemed to me, for a long while actually, that she is being praised more for her choices in films than for her particular abilities. With A Beautiful Mind I think I've come to terms with this. She brings Dark City/Requiem for a Dream/The Hot Spot/The Rocketeer baggage to the film, and increases its cool hipness. She doesn't have any chemistry with Crowe however (I don't think she has chemistry with anything else but the camera; that Waking the Dead trailer is giving me doubts though, lots of doubts), and we don't understand what exactly she needs from him. And while we understand what he needs from her (human contact), his self-accomplishment makes her all the more meaningless.

At first I thought that this lack of romance or intimacy was a flaw in the film, but now I'm beginning to think that its empty attempt at associating itself with romance and intimacy is its biggest flaw. The biggest problem and blessing with A Beautiful Mind may ironically be that it is John Nash incarnate, at least for a while. It’s a chilly and good-looking celebration of the triumph of the individual will for the first three quarters, and then turns into a warm and treacly celebration of humanity on the flip of a dime. It's as schizo and bizarre as its subject.

Enjoy it readers, just make sure you don't stop asking questions.