I read the book "A Beautiful Mind ", the biography of Nobel prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr., and wrote a review (http://www.epinions.com/book-review-35E0-4BCC191-3A2734ED-prod1) a year before the movie and eagerly awaited its release. I was so disappointed--I didn't see any resemblance between the book and the movie at all. It could easily have been a three hour movie and held the audience's attention. It was two and a half hours and with Goldman's script, could have been much less.

I don't know what Ron Howard, the director, was thinking of when he decided on the treatment of the story that he did, or who helped Russell Crowe with his characterization of Nash. Either they read some other books that conflicted with Sylvia Nasar's, or talked to other people to arrive at an entirely different picture.

In the book there are many photos of Nash, one when he was at a swimming pool in a bathing suit, and he was tall, blonde and athletically built. As a young boy at times aggressively fighting with the other kids. Crowe turns Nash into a wimpy seeming guy as he shuffles around like Rainman 2.

The Nobel prize winning Game Theory is squashed and no one would have the faintest idea what it entailed if they hadn't read about it somewhere else. And his most interesting "delusion" sic--that he was able to read code from extraterrestrials on the front page of the New York Times which instructed him to work for world peace and to obsessively write letters to the United Nations--was not mentioned even once. Also, his having worked for several seasons in California for the Rand Corporation was also not shown. Instead, Wheeler Institute at MIT.

The obsessive ideas of aliens and his being drafted to work for world peace were instead turned into sinister Russian spies and a manipulative handler played by Richard Harris as Parcher from the Department of Defense. These are the substances of delusions in the movie and so much film time is wasted with shots of what Ron Howard tries to show as imaginary persons and venues which aren't interesting.

I've read several professional film critics' reviews and they all sound like they were copied off a mass mailing of a publicity prerelease. None of them sound like they've even leafed through the book or understand what the story is all about. Or even thought about trying to understand the man himself.

The entire movie should be reshot and recast. The picture begins abruptly when Nash enters Princeton, his boyhood and family is a blank. Adding the extra half hour and eliminating all those useless boring phantoms would allow for a beginning that would draw the audience into Nash's feelings and development. A West Virginia locale, the small town of Bluefield, his school teacher mother and engineer father, his sister who took care of him, pretty backdrops of an earlier era, blue sky, green hills, a train puffing along the track, a circle of boys kicking a ball, then one little blonde gets upset and tussles with another.

Later, after completing his Ph.D. at Princeton, another change of venue to southern California. Some palm trees as contrast to the stately eastern trees of Princeton's campus, rolling blue waves, sand, people playing on the beach. Then, the cold restricted interior of the Rand Corporation, Nash confined all day in a lonely small room. Unhappy, eventually giving up his job and returning to the Ivy League.

And instead of the same three phantoms following him around, in depth conversations with Dr. Damon, the psychiatrist played by Christopher Plummer, as we piece together his life's traumas, losing his mother after a breakup with a woman he had been involved with prior to meeting his wife. (She was no doubt eliminated from the script and their child out of deference to his present domestic situation, but still mention of a romantic breakup would have been permissible.) Then, with no parents left, his sister who had always been there for him having died, discussions of his disappointments at having been passed over for several prestigious mathematics awards.

And, rather than the usual suspect, i.e., Russian spy, U.S. agent, just a faint humming shadow of the aliens driving him on to keep writing his letters to the United Nations.

There was no interaction between Crowe's character and anyone else basically. Russell was really on his own. There was his wife, but she did not contribute to any understanding of his mental predicament. Discussions between friends who were concerned, other professors, psychiatric interviews--conversation was what was needed in that film.

The engrossing point of the book and movie is a genius's battle with insanity and triumph over it. That is everyone's interpretation. I see things differently, I see a person pressured from academia, family, tradition, female expectations and the competitive striving of the human species just wanting to take a vacation from it all.

And, of course, the extraterrestrials are still around. Just off on a jaunt around the galaxy.





Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older