If there's one thing Oscar voters love, it's bestowing awards upon actors who portray real people.  But if you can somehow land a role in a biopic about a person with some kind of mental or physical handicap (or, better yet, die in some awful and/or tragic way), you may as well start pressing your pants/gown for the big awards ceremony.  Erin Brockovich, Lee Krasner, Brandon Teena, David Helfgott...their Hollywood doppelgangers all won.  That's just in the last five years, and it doesn't take into consideration the dozens of stars who were recently nominated for playing the likes of Reinaldo Arenas, the Marquis de Sade, F.W. Murnau, Ruben Carter, Jeffrey Wigand, Roberta Guaspari, et cetera.

A Beautiful Mind is one of those films that has "Oscar" written all over it. It's about a real person (John Forbes Nash, Jr.) who just happens to be schizophrenic and is played by a guy we know can act his ass off (Gladiator's Russell Crowe, Oscar's angry, reluctant hero last year).  In a great biopic, the lead performance is always strong, but it needs to be complemented by a strong supporting cast, a script that tells the real story of the subject (warts and all), and direction that balances the fine line between breathtaking art and ham-fisted, manipulative schlock.  Mind has most of those things going for it, faltering only when it comes to screenplay and direction, and it's mighty pretty, on account of being shot by The Man Who Wasn't There's Roger Deakins.

The film opens in 1947, where Nash has just begun graduate school for mathematics at Princeton thanks to the prestigious Carnegie scholarship.  We quickly learn he's a cocky genius who dislikes other people nearly as much as they dislike him (he's told God gave him "two helpings of brain, but only half of heart").  Mocked by his blue-blooded classmates and occasionally brought out of his shell by his hard-partying roommate Charles (Paul Bettany, A Knight's Tale), Nash is tremendously focused on coming up with an original idea to publish that will set the world on its ear.

He eventually hits pay dirt, authoring a theory that shatters 150 years of conventional economic thinking dating back to Adam Smith.  It puts Nash on the math map and lands him his dream placement at Wheeler Defense Labs and, begrudgingly, a teaching post at MIT, where he meets and marries a physics student named Alicia (Jennifer Connelly, Requiem For a Dream). Before long the Pentagon comes a-calling, hoping Nash can crack an important Russian code, which, of course, he does in record time.  This feat garners Nash a top-secret job at the Department of Defense with a shadowy character played by Pollock's Ed Harris, who, ironically, was Crowe's stiffest competition at the Oscars last year in the midst of filming Mind (wonder what the next day on that set was like?).

But then things begin to unravel quickly for Nash.  His usually erratic behavior becomes more and more unpredictable, alarming everyone around him and eventually leading to a diagnosis of schizophrenia as well as a brief institutional stay around the time Alicia gives birth to their only child. This all happens within the first hour of Mind, and the rest of the film focuses on everyone's attempt to cope with the sad, debilitating illness that has Nash imagining people, places, things and other nouns, too.

I'd like to say Crowe has never been this good, but he has...in The Insider (the year where he had the misfortune of being up against Kevin Spacey). It's still one of the better roles you'll see all year and seems a shoo-in for a Hanks-like third nomination in a row.  But we expect that from him, even after Proof of Life.  More surprising is the performance of the usually grating Connelly, whose Alicia boasts a deft combination of care, compassion and devotion despite a growing fear her husband will either burn down the house or eat the baby like a submarine sandwich.

Less impressive are the screenplay and Ron Howard's direction.  Writer Akiva Goldsman (he of the two bad Batman films fame), adapting the script from Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nash, reveals only the warts that aren't too ugly (there is no mention of Nash's bisexuality or of his divorce from Alicia).  Howard (The Grinch) has big problems setting Mind's pace, which starts out derivative (of Pi, Searching For Bobby Fischer, Good Will Hunting, et al.), then gets interesting.  Then it gets slow, and then really slow.  Then kind of interesting again.  Then predictable.  On the plus side, some of Mind's imaginary characters are fleshed out better than the real ones in Ocean's Eleven, but that's not so much a commendation of this film so much as a knock on the other.

2:07 –

for intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence