A Beautiful Mind (Widescreen Awards Edition)

Rating:
Summary: THE AUDIENCE IS MORE MATURE THAN DIRECTORS THINK
Review: I know Nash from game theory classes, specifically for his most prodigious econometric contribution that's popularly known as Nash Equilibrium, a way of describing how people caught in a strategic decision-making situation may respond based on their assumptions about each others' behaviour.

Not only is that pivotal element skipped (except for fine print in the epilogue), casual viewers may also come away thinking that he was some sort of cross between a paranoid pseudo-codebreaker gone awry, and a crazy genius who devised a mathematical approach for picking up women and then forgot all about it.

Russel Crowe may have been twice as credible if he didn't struggle to imitate Geoffrey Rush in Shine or Fred Gwynne as one of the Munsters. Well, Ok, I am over-analyzing. Jennifer Connelly does well to potray a doting wife, but the fact that his real-world wife had divorced Nash is totally ignored. For that matter, we're never even told that their son, also an ingenious math whiz and a schizophrenic, suffered as much at the hands of fate and society as his father.

Why was a more honest, less Hollywoodized depiction of the mathematician so difficult to manage? None of such facts would have lessened Nash's accomplishment or undermined the originality of his contributions, but their omission suggests that the director was not confident in addressing the audience as grown-ups.

If you know little about John Nash -- the troubled, violent, gifted mathematician -- this may come across as a very well made movie, as the numerous accolades it bagged may prove. But the film in its half-baked form is a bit of a gyp for anyone who knows a bit about the man and his much grander complexity. I still give it three stars for holding your attention, but I wonder if anyone would willingly watch it more than once.