"A Beautiful Mind"

Before we learn that, Howard gets to stage a car chase and shootout with Harris and Crowe being pursued by foreign agents. Were Howard and Goldsman afraid that without this cheap espionage subplot to snooker the audience, Nash's story wouldn't be interesting? Essentially, they pass up the chance to delineate how the workings of John Nash's mind were bent toward a schizophrenic delusion in favor of providing some easy thrills for the audience.

And if you're going to have someone stoop that low but still maintain the air of a holiday prestige release, then Ron Howard's your man. He directs in his usual impersonal, "important" style, substituting the surge of big emotional moments for any sense of storytelling coherence or rhythm. "A Beautiful Mind" throws you into the story before giving you your bearings and expects you to immediately start reacting to the buttons Howard pushes.

Nash's eager young Princeton classmates assembled in the university's wood-paneled walls are meant to evoke eager youthful ambition, no matter that Howard barely distinguishes one from the other. We read Nash's decline from the fact that he stops shaving and the surroundings get shabbier. The movie tells us nothing about Nash's work (we're just meant to see he's brilliant), or his influential refocusing of game theory on the individual rather than the group.

Nasar writes that Nash introduced the concept of mutual gain into game theory, hypothesizing that "the game would be solved when every player independently chose his best response to the other players' best strategies." It's clear why that theory has had so many ramifications in economics, which is subject to a multitude of players and factors. Perhaps the filmmakers surmised it would be too difficult for audiences to grasp. And truth be told, we wouldn't have to know anything about Nash's work to be moved by his story. But couldn't Goldsman at least have included a short speech or even a few lines about Nash's great accomplishment? It's hard to credit Nash's reemergence when we haven't been given an idea of what's been lost.

There is one genuine reemergence in "A Beautiful Mind" and that's Jennifer Connelly, who is touching as Nash's doggedly faithful wife, Alicia. After being relegated to junk movie roles, Connelly has been doing good work for a few years now, in "Waking the Dead" and in last year's "Requiem for a Dream." This, though, is her reentry into the mainstream, and it deserves to be the start of wonderful things for her. Connelly has a knack for responding to a moment with all her emotions while retaining some semblance of composure (the same way she seems on her guard when Nash is wooing her), and that contrast provides the only honest emotion in the movie. It takes a great deal of talent to seem real in a movie as fundamentally dishonest as this one.

"A Beautiful Mind" is a typical example of Hollywood's chickening out on chancy material, softening the edges of a story and characters, and shoehorning things into a tidy inspirational package. And it's the type of movie that invariably gets people who don't respond to it accused of being heartless. But before the usual charges of cynicism get hurled, I'd just ask that one thing be kept in mind. Unlike "Flowers for Algernon" or "Rain Man," this isn't some concoction. It's the story of a man's life. It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.

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