"A Beautiful Mind"

Ron Howard and Russell Crowe team up to produce a very dumb movie about a very smart man.

By Charles Taylor

Dec. 21, 2001 | "A Beautiful Mind" is a film for everyone who longs to see Russell Crowe in "Flowers for Algernon." It's a tortured-genius movie, and Crowe lives down to the conception with a performance that is possibly the biggest load of hooey to stink up the screen this year.

When actors take on the role of a genius or a crazy person or a mentally handicapped person, they're practically inviting temptation. There's no way of knowing what goes on in the mind of a genius, and it's damnably hard to find a way to make sense of a schizophrenic's view of the world. So actors often resort to impersonations, ladling on odd, eccentric mannerisms because they can't get inside the characters. (That's what Dustin Hoffman did in "Rain Man.") In the case of genius roles, the most common method performers adopt is to writhe under the burden of the greatness they're trying to extract from their outsize brains. Some actors get to do both: Geoffrey Rush in "Shine," for one, and Russell Crowe here.

John Nash, the MIT mathematician who won a 1994 Nobel Prize in economics after emerging from years of schizophrenia, is both a genius and a crazy person. And Crowe, sniffing out an opportunity the way a hound scents a hare, sets off. Watching his performance is like going to some dog track where the mechanical rabbit has been replaced by an Oscar.

Crowe doesn't miss a tic. He clumps along in big boxy suits like someone who's just learned to walk; he shifts from side to side; he mutters to himself or speaks in a husky, vaguely courtly Southern accent; he keeps his head down when talking to others as if he could will his whole cranium to disappear into his chin dimple, like smoke into a genie's lamp.

And that's just in the opening scenes at Princeton. When Nash starts to come apart, Crowe gets to sweat and gibber and cower and drool and pop his eyes, he gets to flip his body like an electrified fish as Nash is institutionalized and given insulin shock treatments. It's a prodigious display -- the Stations of the Cross as an acting decathlon.

It's a performance I would have thought Crowe incapable of giving. Through it all, there's no sense of what's going on inside Nash. Crowe has made the classic mistake of acting emotions (or mannerisms) instead of objectives. The performance is conceived in terms of a show rather than an exploration.

Nash was a particularly driven man. He disliked reading, feeling that it stifled creativity. In her biography of Nash (also titled "A Beautiful Mind") Sylvia Nasar relates that as a first-year grad student at Princeton, he was coming up with a series of complex and important mathematical ideas. These ideas had already been elucidated by other mathematicians; amazingly, Nash had come up with them with no knowledge of his predecessors' work. And so Nash became more determined to come up with an idea that was all his. But Crowe doesn't play Nash as a man trying to prove himself an original thinker so he can win the attention that his withdrawal keeps him from finding socially. He plays the desperation that arises from that desire. In other words, he's put the cart before the horse.

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