A Beautiful Mind

I'm not going to attempt to review this objectively, but "A Beautiful Mind" takes a big risk and reaps a great reward in delving much farther than you would expect a mainstream movie to delve into the pain, longing and excruciating work that accompany not only mental illness, but recovery from mental illness. Though the movie does not name it as such, John Nash (Russell Crowe) ends up casting off debilitating medication and using a form of cognitive therapy, in which one simply trains oneself to cut off negative or self-destructive thoughts, to attempt to cure his delusional schizophrenia, or at least to make his world livable. The whole process, renouncing meds and then renouncing thoughts, is portrayed as harrowing: halting, hard-won progress, frequent slips, and eventual triumph through sheer force of will. As someone who put myself through cognitive therapy for years and years to make myself so well-adjusted that I can now review movies (wait...), I can testify that the portrayal of what Nash goes through in this movie is as accurate as a movie can make it.

Crowe does a brilliant job in the role, always making it clear that even as he says, "I don't much like people and they don't much like me," the statement is true because of inability and not temperment as such. And his sense of longing when he describes his life without his delusions, admitting that he has had to cut off his own imagination to live in the world, rang true with me. You do lose things when you recover from mental illness, things that you long for but which are dangerous to search for. These are harsh truths, truths that don't make it into the movies much, and Ron Howard is to be commended for having the guts to explore these truths with major-studio money.

Does "A Beautiful Mind" take liberties with Nash's life? It takes massive liberties with Nash's life. Does it resolve itself with a quick rush of fairly predictable dialogue? Yup. All this, to me, was irrelevant, which is why I can't make any pretense of writing a "real" review. If you want to better understand the issues I have raised above - and what this film will provide is emotional understanding, which in some ways is more valuable in this context than intellectual - you need to see "A Beautiful Mind."

Finally, I have often displayed contempt for the demands of various interest groups for "representation" in Hollywood or on the airwaves. Having seen a dilemma of a type I have faced represented on the screen, and knowing that many other people would see it, I have to say I felt a vague but warm comfort knowing that that other people might understand a little bit more. I will try to be nicer in the future.

Editor's note: I meant, nicer to movies that didn't otherwise suck.

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