A Beautiful Mind Details

Ron Howard makes pictures of quality if not always distinction. So after years of being ignored by the American Academy as a director, it seems that with this biographical drama he decided 2002 would be his Oscar year. The true story of maths genius John Forbes Nash Jr who battled paranoid schizophrenia at the height of his academic success and eventually won the Nobel Prize, is tailor-made Oscar fare. It has the triumph-over-tragedy, against-all-odds theme going for it, plus a powerhouse performance from Russell Crowe as Nash. Any film that traces nearly 50 years of an influential man's life is making a claim to some celluloid glory, but underneath all the impressive ageing makeup, what exactly do we have here? A difficult man with a complex psychological condition — reduced to a series of delusional episodes to furnish a thriller subplot — who has devoted his life to an almost insurmountably dry subject, namely advanced mathematics theory. This is in no way a badly made picture, and there's reliable support from Ed Harris, Adam Goldberg and Paul Bettany. However, the film's overweening desire to be taken seriously gets in the way of the story. That said, the film won the best picture Oscar, Howard walked away with best director and Jennifer Connelly won a best supporting actress statuette for her well judged performance as Nash's wife, though Crowe lost out as best actor to Denzel Washington in Training Day.

A throwback in style to Warner's biopics of the 30s on Louis Pasteur and others, with Crowe standing in for Paul Muni: a messy life is rendered in simple, bright colours and given the standard narrative trajectory of triumph over adversity.