Year:
2001
Production:
Universal Pictures, Dreamworks SKG,
Imagine Entertainment
Feature:
4/5
DVD:
4/5
A Beautiful Mind
is a dramatized biography of mathematician John Forbes Nash (Russell
Crowe) who recently won the Nobel prize for some a new economic theory
he invented in college in the early 1950's. Nash suffered from
schizophrenia which wasn't diagnosed in him until much later than is
usual. The movie focuses on his brilliance and his relationship with
his wife, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), and it has an interesting
presentation of schizophrenia.
If you haven't heard about the movie or know the story and you want to
be surprised then you should have stopped reading at the word Mind in
the previous paragraph. I didn't know the story so watching the movie
was surprising. Basically Nash has these imaginary characters which he
thinks are real and I thought they were real too.
There's his college roommate Charles (Paul Bettany who I just saw in Wimbledon and before that in A Knight's Tale) and Charles' niece
Marcee (Vivien Cardone). Charles lends support to Nash during his
solitary time in Princeton.
Then there's Parcher (Ed Harris) who props up Nash's sense of
brilliance by making him into a spy (really more of a secret analyst
for the OSS). Nash spends a lot of time (years?) cracking "secret"
codes in various publications trying to track down a Soviet spy ring
that is trying to smuggle a nuclear weapon onto US soil.
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It all comes
crashing down when Alicia gets really worried about Nash. Nash is taken
to a psychiatric hospital and at that point I still believed Nash and
thought that it was a Soviet plot. But then the truth comes out and
even then when Parcher reappears and explains things I almost believed
him. That's how well the movie portrays Nash's madness to the audience.
In the end it's a story about a very ill man and his wife and their
love and how he learned to overcome his illness (though it was never
cured) and become a respected professor at Princeton. It's a great
movie and definitely deserved the best picture Oscar.
Extras
Commentary Track: director Ron Howard
Commentary Track: screenwriter Akiva Goldsman
Deleted Scenes: 27 minutes with optional commentary
Production Notes
Disc 2
A Beautiful Partnership: Ron Howard and Brian Grazer (5:23)
Development of the Screenplay (8:17)
Meeting John Nash (8:28)
Accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics (1:57)
Casting Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly (5:56)
The Process of Age Progression (7:14)
Storyboard Comparisons
Creation of the Special Effects (10:46)
Scoring the Film (5:54)
Inside A Beautiful Mind
(22:30)
Academy Awards (about 5:30)
Theatrical Trailer
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