While I never go into a piece directed by Ron Howard with the greatest of expectations, I did expect a strong experience from his work within A Beautiful Mind. An Academy Award winner, awards darling and a commendable cast who have brought us exceptional performances time and time again, the show is off to a great start. Bringing Russell Crowe into a leading performance hot off of the heels of his performance in Gladiator and pairing him with Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer and Paul Bettany is a recipe for success. It’s a shame then that this mixture of extreme talent isn’t quite enough to muster up anything exceptionally interesting or worthwhile.
A Beautiful Mind is, by all means, a very competently made biopic. It finds itself in the right place at the right time, an adaptation of John Nash’s life, an asocial mathematician who struggled with bouts of schizophrenia. Crowe embodies this role rather well, in a series of scenes that provide a blur between reality and fiction with extreme ease. His natural talent as a performer make these scenes relatively easy to follow, the twists and turns throughout peppering drama into the film where it’s least expected. Commendable efforts from Howard and Crowe in these scenes make for interesting viewing, the conviction of this leading performance is more than enough to get an audience through the slower or less interesting scenes.
There’s not much else, though. Crowe is great, that’s about it. A Beautiful Mind doesn’t do anything else of vague interest outside of a turn of events leading to some narrative structure that avoids the relatively familiar pitfalls of other biopics. It’s not boring, though, I should make that clear. Pockets of interest are featured throughout, with Harris offering some nice supporting work that only bolsters Crowe more and more as a strong lead. Bettany does the same, his performance there as a way of indulging the more free-flowing and party-minded side to Nash and his days in University.
Competent, vaguely interesting and well-crafted, A Beautiful Mind is a film that fails to leave any particularly unique mark on audiences. Crowe provides a strong performance, one that is easy to appreciate as the high point of his career, not in quality, but in popularity. It’s still strange to think that A Beautiful Mind was so highly regarded upon its initial release, especially considering it is relatively tepid in both style and execution.
