A Beautiful Mind Review

Akiva Goldsman's script keeps the audience inside Nash's head, and for much of the first half it plays as a Cold War espionage thriller; on a first viewing the device works, and the turn is well planted and genuinely unsettling. Roger Deakins gives it a polished, autumnal handsomeness, James Horner's score keeps it moving, and Russell Crowe is committed and physically inventive as Nash, all hunched shoulders and averted eyes. Jennifer Connelly won the Oscar for giving Alicia a toughness the script does not always earn her.

The trouble is what it leaves out and what it invents. The Princeton pen ceremony near the end never existed as a tradition, and the film skips Nash's divorce from Alicia in 1963, the son he abandoned, and the fact that he had stopped taking medication long before the Nobel; Howard said a line about newer medications was added so the film would not seem to suggest schizophrenia can be beaten without them. That says a good deal about its priorities: careful, reassuring, built to win. It won four Oscars including Best Picture. The Washington Post called it one of those formulaically rendered Important Subject movies, and time has mostly agreed.