A Beautiful Mind

Film has a pretty poor track record of portraying insanity. All too often it's merely an simple obstacle, nothing a little self determination will not clear up. It's also often an endearing personality trait, a means of delving into fantasy and occasionally outright Academy Award bait. Here is manages to be all four. I suppose I should really forgive it, as it is after all a story and thus it attempts to compel as much as to represent, but having recently watched a film in which schizophrenia was powerfully handled it was jarring to see one that fell back upon the simplistic when trying to detail an extraordinarily complex individual.

And that wasn't the only oversimplification that bugged me. Admittedly the task of making maths appear cinematic is not an easy one, and it does make the pattern recognition the man has a flair for very satisfying, but these being the things for which he is famous I was hoping for a little more detail. The description of his famous game theory is presented in such a straightforward way I found myself grasping to believe that this was in any way the originall idea the film seems to be insisting it is. Every man for himself not always the best idea? Hard to see as inspired stuff.

I feel I should credit Russel Crowe with bravely playing against type, but I rather like him in his usual roles while here his mumbling, mildly troubled caricature of an academic with biceps as thick as his neck just left me slightly puzzled. He didn't really have the charm to make his disdain for social practices attractive, but it's never presented as a flaw and so just left me feeling he was kind of a dick. The shuffling old man routine of the films latter half has been done so much better so many times that it quickly lost my attention.

I essentially just lost interest in the film as it went on. His flights of fantasy (I can be reductive too) and the intricate puzzles therein turn out to be far more interesting than his actual life and once they had been (so seemingly easily) left behind I found it rather derailing a little, the pace it had set giving way to a mop up operation and a healthy course of overtly manipulative sympathy scenes.