A Beautiful Mind

I found A Beautiful Mind, starring Russel Crowe and Ed Harris, directed by Ron Howard, to be a fascinating film from several standpoints. Beyond the purely dramatic there was the idea that a man could fight his own mental disorder with his own mind and shear will-power.

There was also the manifestation of the illness of the Crowe character, meant to be John Forbes Nash, Jr. What I found intriguing was not his schizophrenic hallucinations, but what they drive him to do...gather and process information and search for a secret correlations in the data. The culminating scene where his wife, played by Jennifer Connelly, walks into the garage struck me with awe. All around her she sees magazine and newspaper clippings posted and grouped and categorized in an effort to make sense of all the connections between the information. I wondered at that moment if this were really something that an insane man would do and if there were not something to his idea, not that the communists are out there sending messages, but that there is some lesson to be learned from all this data.

This is an uplifting story, well told and well thought out. I have always liked Ron Howard as a director. He chooses his projects well and executes them with a professionalism seldom equaled in the movie industry. (Having said this however, I thought his version of the Grinch rather abysmal). But his older films like The Paper and Backdraft still hold up.

This movie won the academy award for best picture in 2001. I highly recommend it.

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