A Beautiful Mind is the story of John Nash (Russell Crowe), a talented mathematician, stricken with a mental illness while at the height of his career. A freshman at Princeton, John Nash set out to come up with an original idea - how else would he be able to set himself apart from the rest of the class? After various trials and tribulations, he comes up with the idea, eventually graduates and is presented with a job at Wheeler, on the campus of MIT. He's teaching and doing small jobs for the government, but when he's called in to break a Russian code, John Nash is swept away into the world of international intrigue and is presented with a top-secret mission to find codes in various magazines - Life, Time, etc. - and report back to his handler, William Parcher (Ed Harris).

Everything seems to be going fine in John's life - he's finally getting somewhere with his deciphering of the various texts, he's got a girlfriend and his job is stable, but one day, everything falls apart. His cover seemingly blown, John believes the Russians have discovered his work and have taken him to a secret mental institution. Here's where the plot takes a decidedly different turn and the movie starts to get good - up to this point, the film had labored to set up the story of John Nash and his job with the government. It was a slow, drawn out process that ultimately leads to little interest in the rest of the film as a whole.

After being taken to the mental institution, the film picks up the pace and gets really good, but it only sets us up for yet another let-down with a less than stellar ending - again lathargic and slow, the ending leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Slow story aside, the movie features exceptional acting performances turned in by both Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly (Nash's wife) - both whom have landed in my top 5 of the year. Crowe does a magnificent job in portraying the tortured Nash as he struggles to combat his illness and lead a somewhat normal life following his stay in the institution. Opposite him, Connelly turns in a performance that truly astounds as she must deal with his mental illness firsthand and come to terms with her own feelings of abandonment and infidelity. While I'd like to give credit to director Ron Howard for bringing these performances out of the actors, I think that he had little to do with these spectacular outputs. His directing throughout was not the specatular direction I've come to expect from Howard, but rather bland and uninspired. The end result is typical Ron Howard held up solely by the amazing talents of both Crowe and Connelly.

Basically it comes down to the simple point that the plot fails to entertain throughout. Both the start and the end of this film are laboriously slow with only a brief period in the middle providing some action and some interesting plot twists. While both Crowe and Connelly put forth magnificent performances, it's just not enough to pull this film off the floor.

Genres: Drama, Romance
Rated: PG-13 - For intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence.
Runtime: 129 minutes
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