A Beautiful Mind Review

Years ago I said "Russell Crowe will win an Oscar for that performance" and he did. The movie won 4 Oscars; another 27 awards and got 48 nominations. Crowe won best actor as John Nash, the mathematical genius; the movie got best movie and Jennifer Connelly as Nash's wife, Alicia, won best supporting actress.

In the movie and in real life Nash in 1994 received the Nobel Prize in Economics (along with two others), as a result of his game theory work as a Princeton graduate student.

The movie is based on the 1998 bestseller by Sylvia Nasar.

Alicia Nash plays the role of John's student and then wife superbly. She is beautiful as well as talented and her compassion for her husband came through on the screen. For me watching her stay with John in spite of his not knowing whether he would hurt her was difficult to watch. In the end I applaud her as my hero.

Christopher Plummer does a wonderful job playing Dr. Rosen, Nash's psychiatrist, who  works very hard teaching Nash, medicating Nash and using shock treatment to help Nash decipher what and who is real and not.

Other actors include Ed Harris, Judd Hirsh, Adam Goldberg.

The movie was directed by Ron Howard.

A Beautiful Mind took me, as it did Nash, from reality to delusional thinking and hallucinations without my even knowing it was happening - twice!

This movie is 135 minutes long. At times it can be slow but hang in there.

There are a couple of flaws in the movie at least from my view:

They showed Tupperware before it had been invented.

I have a hard time with accents in general when they are either bad or in this case there were too many times I couldn't understand what Crowe was saying.

Though not a flaw I would have liked some glimpse into his childhood.

This movie is rated PG-13.

A Beautiful Mind is a movie about mental illness; love; courage; the will to keep going and the spirit to overcome. This is not a "chick flick." This is a wonderfully made movie with fabulous acting about a most amazing man.