Hollywood's jaded belief that mentally crazy people, (like Nash) or impaired people (like in I Am Sam and Forrest Gump), are somehow heartwarming, continues. The best movie of 2001, (a sad year for good movies, apparently), is a Ron Howard and Russell Crowe flick with Oscar written all over it. An all star cast helps. In this flick, Russell Crowe plays the brilliant but totally schizophrenic math teacher, John Forbes Nash.
Nash goes mad slowly over the course of the movie, but Crowe plays him like he’s a loopy sort of absent minded professor, which is kind of insulting, and he spends much of the time talking to people that aren’t there and making a conspiracy of things, including assembling vast webs of nutty things on his room wall and in a barn. The people in his life are not so much scared of this as doey eyed and understanding, but this is supposed to be a period piece set in a time which such people would have been fired and then locked up in an institution. It plays like a modernist retelling of a clearly stranger person, some time ago. Presumably he did continue to teach and everything, but it seems a disservice to mad people to make them off like Crowe did.
This movie doesn't get four stars here because Nash was reportedly not nearly as likeable as the Hollywood version, made up to look almost like you'd care for him even with his hallucinations and paranoia. Uh, that's not likely. Besides, he's a math teacher. It's not like the boys at ivy league schools were lining up to hang out with this Nash guy at parties, like in the movie.
Review by Adam Browne
Review by Adam Browne
Agreed: Not only was 2001 a strange year for movies, it was also another one for 'mental illness of the year' movies. They got back to that a decade later in Black Swan, a much better and more accurate movie. That said, at the Oscars, Nash was present and the chair next to him was empty, as it was for one of his imaginary friends. Maybe. Anyway, it is not likely Beautiful Mind will go down as the most awesome movie of the early 2000a.
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