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A
BEAUTIFUL MIND
5/10
USA
2001 : Ron Howard : 136 mins
Is
this film favourite to win Best Picture and Best Director at this year’s
Oscars because it’s the year’s best film? No. It’s because nobody expected
such a “serious” biopic to clock over $100m at the US box office. So has
it clocked over $100m at the US box office because it’s an unusually good
film? No. It’s because people have gone back and seen it for the second
and third time. And is this because it gains in depth with multiple viewings?
No. It’s because there’s a massive twist half way through, the kind that
makes you want to rewind the damn thing all the way back and scan it more
carefully in search of clues.
Admittedly,
the twist is very unexpected, and rather clever, and entirely justified,
on the grounds of being a dramatically powerful way to bring us into the
schizophrenic mind of Nobel-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash (Russell
Crowe). You think you’ve been watching a rather inept, clumsy attempt
to make the potentially dry subject of maths interesting by grafting on
a silly thriller plot (which is exactly what, interestingly enough, Matt
Damon and Ben Affleck tried to do in their early drafts of Good Will
Hunting, the only other Hollywood film to mention the fabled ‘Fields
Medal’.) But just as you’re starting to lose interest, BLAM!, the rug
is well and truly pulled from under your feet.
Unfortunately,
it’s kind of downhill from this sudden peak, and the final hour is a tedious
retreat into the kind of schmaltz that has given director Howard a bad
name, culminating in some embarrassing prosthetics as we see the aged
Nash and his wife (Jennifer Connelly) at the Nobel ceremony. To get to
this point, Nash has had to pass a precautionary checkout by a Nobel emissary,
sent to ascertain whether he might flip out at the gong ceremony – because,
according to the script, the Nobels are reliant on ‘private funding’.
This will be news to the Norwegian eminences, who thought they’d been
getting by all these years on the royalties from dynamite.
Crowe
did this ‘grey-haired, introverted teacher’ more convincingly back in
The Insider, though it’s hard to tell whether his performance here
is so mannered because (a) Howard can’t direct actors or (b) schizophrenics
in general, and Nash in particular, really do carry on like this. Whatever,
there’s absolutely no excuse to have the young Nash deliver a lecture
in a figure-hugging white vest – the script doesn’t even bother to include
a token line (about the bloke playing some kind of sport while at college,
or something) that might partially justify Nash’s surprisingly, ahem,
gladiatorial physique.
25th
February, 2002
(seen
Cineworld, Milton Keynes, 24th January 2002)
by Neil
Young
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