Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly make Ron Howard’s softened biography worth watching for its domestic scenes. The film’s insistence on being reassuring leaves too little room for the difficulties it raises.
Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind is worth watching for the two people at its centre, provided we accept how much their story has been softened. This is a biography of mathematician John Nash that wants to make intellectual brilliance and schizophrenia comprehensible to a broad audience. That is a reasonable ambition, and Howard approaches it with patience and sympathy. But he is so determined to reassure us that the difficult questions receive less attention than the feelings.
Russell Crowe gives Nash enough awkwardness to stop the part becoming simply an invitation to admire a gifted man. The effort in the performance can be conspicuous, but we can feel the frustration beneath it rather than merely being told that Nash is exceptional. Crowe makes the domestic passages matter because his intelligence offers so little help with the person beside him. He is at his most convincing when the film gives him a relationship to negotiate.
Jennifer Connelly, as Alicia Nash, gives those passages their weight. We were moved by the strain in the marriage, because Connelly makes Alicia’s effort to understand Nash feel like work that has to be done again tomorrow. Her performance allows affection and exasperation to occupy the same scene without demanding that either cancel the other. Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay does not always give her comparable room, too often treating her as reassurance for Nash when her own experience deserves our attention.
Roger Deakins’s cinematography is persuasive about Nash’s unusual perception. The images let us share some of his concentration and confusion, instead of simply watching an actor indicate them, and this helps Howard draw us into an experience that dialogue alone would struggle to convey. Wynn Thomas’s production design contributes to the picture’s orderly, comfortable appearance. That polish suits Howard’s conventional biography, although it makes the uncertainty of Nash’s experience harder to feel.
Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill’s editing makes the broad sweep of the biography easy to follow, but the transitions can feel too ready to move us towards the next lesson. James Horner’s score applies similar pressure, urging a response that Crowe and Connelly are already capable of earning. We do not need the emotional instructions repeated quite so insistently. Across 135 minutes, Howard gives sentiment more space than it needs and leaves the harder aspects of Nash’s life underexamined.
As a biographical drama, this has a familiar fondness for perseverance and a marked reluctance to complicate an admirable central figure. Goldsman gives us too little sense of why the mathematics matters beyond establishing Nash’s exceptional ability. We need not ask for a lecture to want some understanding of what keeps a person at his work. The film spends considerably more effort making Nash sympathetic than making his thinking comprehensible.
There is enough in Crowe and Connelly’s work to justify an evening for anyone drawn to the marriage as much as the mathematics. The domestic scenes allow uncertainty and weariness to interrupt Howard’s good intentions, and they are better for it. We would have welcomed more of that ordinary difficulty and less encouragement. Come for the performances, with modest expectations of how much the film will explain.
