A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard)
That Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman grossly distort the life of John Nash, though I can’t deny it bothers me, is not, in and of itself, why this is a bad movie. (Here’s an article detailing the changes.) Goldsman does comes up with one decent idea (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about), and the dilemma faced by the movie’s Nash, played in a skillfull performance by Russell Crowe, is compelling. But everything surrounding this kernel of interest is clichéd, manipulative schlock. This is the kind of movie in which our loveably eccentric genius scrawls elaborate formulas on the panes of the windows of his dorm room (more photogenic than a notebook, duh), reaches his career-defining epiphany by observing a mundane situation (picking up girls in a bar–way to make the cerebral cinematic, Akiva!), and, as a teacher on the first day of class, slaps a famously unsolved equation on the chalkboard and dares his students to have at it. This is the kind of movie in which an incredibly beautiful gamine (a painter who apparently takes advanced mathematics classes to look for dates) practically throws herself at our hero, for…well, for no reason at all (though I guess he does look sort of like Russell Crowe). This is the kind of movie where you know every seemingly trivial event and florid line of dialogue in the first act will be repeated with “resonance” in the third–which brings us to the execrable last twenty minutes, which consist of not one, not two, not three, but at least four or five separate “uplifting” emotional climaxes (each with their accompanying musical cues). It’s the unholy spawn of Good Will Hunting, Shine and Mr. Holland’s Opus. Blech. C-
