movie review about a beautiful mind

A Beautiful Mind

The Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches at Princeton, and walks to campus every day. That these commonplace statements nearly brought tears to my eyes suggests the power of “A Beautiful Mind,” the story of a man who is one of the greatest mathematicians, and a victim of schizophrenia. Nash’s discoveries in game theory have an impact on our lives every day. He also believed for a time that Russians were sending him coded messages on the front page of the New York Times.

“A Beautiful Mind” stars Russell Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia, who is pregnant with their child when the first symptoms of his disease become apparent. It tells the story of a man whose mind was of enormous service to humanity while at the same time betrayed him with frightening delusions. Crowe brings the character to life by sidestepping sensationalism and building with small behavioral details. He shows a man who descends into madness and then, unexpectedly, regains the ability to function in the academic world. Nash has been compared to Newton, Mendel and Darwin, but was also for many years just a man muttering to himself in the corner.

Director Ron Howard is able to suggest a core of goodness in Nash that inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope and, in her words in his darkest hour, “to believe that something extraordinary is possible.” The movie’s Nash begins as a quiet but cocky young man with a West Virginia accent, who gradually turns into a tortured, secretive paranoid who believes he is a spy being trailed by government agents. Crowe, who has an uncanny ability to modify his look to fit a role, always seems convincing as a man who ages 47 years during the film.

The early Nash, seen at Princeton in the late 1940s, calmly tells a scholarship winner “there is not a single seminal idea on either of your papers.” When he loses at a game of Go, he explains: “I had the first move. My play was perfect. The game is flawed.” He is aware of his impact on others (“I don’t much like people and they don’t much like me”) and recalls that his first-grade teacher said he was “born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart.” It is Alicia who helps him find the heart. She is a graduate student when they meet, is attracted to his genius, is touched by his loneliness, is able to accept his idea of courtship when he informs her, “Ritual requires we proceed with a number of platonic activities before we have sex.” To the degree that he can be touched, she touches him, although often he seems trapped inside himself; Sylvia Nasar , who wrote the 1998 biography that informs Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay, begins her book by quoting Wordsworth about “a man forever voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” Nash’s schizophrenia takes a literal, visual form. He believes he is being pursued by a federal agent ( Ed Harris ), and imagines himself in chase scenes that seem inspired by 1940s crime movies. He begins to find patterns where no patterns exist. One night he and Alicia stand under the sky and he asks her to name any object, and then connects stars to draw it. Romantic, but it’s not so romantic when she discovers his office thickly papered with countless bits torn from newspapers and magazines and connected by frantic lines into imaginary patterns.

The movie traces his treatment by an understanding psychiatrist ( Christopher Plummer ), and his agonizing courses of insulin shock therapy. Medication helps him improve somewhat–but only, of course, when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more effective, and he begins a tentative re-entry into the academic world at Princeton.

The movie fascinated me about the life of this man, and I sought more information, finding that for many years he was a recluse, wandering the campus, talking to no one, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, paging through piles of newspapers and magazines. And then one day he paid a quite ordinary compliment to a colleague about his daughter, and it was noticed that Nash seemed better.

There is a remarkable scene in the movie when a representative for the Nobel committee ( Austin Pendleton ) comes visiting, and hints that he is being “considered” for the prize. Nash observes that people are usually informed they have won, not that they are being considered: “You came here to find out if I am crazy and would screw everything up if I won.” He did win, and did not screw everything up.

The movies have a way of pushing mental illness into corners. It is grotesque, sensational, cute, funny, willful, tragic or perverse. Here it is simply a disease, which renders life almost but not quite impossible for Nash and his wife, before he becomes one of the lucky ones to pull out of the downward spiral.

When he won the Nobel, Nash was asked to write about his life, and he was honest enough to say his recovery is “not entirely a matter of joy.” He observes: “Without his ‘madness,’ Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.” Without his madness, would Nash have also lived and then been forgotten? Did his ability to penetrate the most difficult reaches of mathematical thought somehow come with a price attached? The movie does not know and cannot say.

(Note: For Nash’s autobiographical statement, go to www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html)

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Judd Hirsch as Helinger
• Paul Bettany as Charles
• Jennifer Connelly as Alicia
• Russell Crowe as John Nash
• Ed Harris as Parcher
• Christopher Plummer as Dr. Rosen

Directed by

Based on the book by.

• Sylvia Nasar

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Parents' guide to, a beautiful mind.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 9 Reviews
• Kids Say 26 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

By Nell Minow , based on child development research. How do we rate?

Oscar-winning biopic is too intense for tweens.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know the material might be very upsetting for kids, or for anyone who has relatives with mental illness or who knows very little about it. There are some strong scenes of family tension and peril, including a child in jeopardy, scuffles, and potential domestic abuse. There are graphic scenes of shock…

Why Age 14+?

Some strong language.

Includes some crude references.

Tense scenes, including a shoot-out, a child in peril, and domestic violence.

Any Positive Content?

Main character, who copes with mental illness, is successful and respected.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

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Violence & Scariness

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Positive Role Models

Parents need to know the material might be very upsetting for kids, or for anyone who has relatives with mental illness or who knows very little about it. There are some strong scenes of family tension and peril, including a child in jeopardy, scuffles, and potential domestic abuse. There are graphic scenes of shock therapy and self-destructive behavior. A character is in peril involving shooting. There is also some crude language with sexual references. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (9)
• Kids say (26)

Based on 9 parent reviews

Celebrates neurodiversity

What's the story.

A man sees what no one else can, and we call him a genius. A man sees what no one else does, and we call him crazy. This Academy Award-winner for Best Picture is about a man who was both. It's the true story of genius John Forbes Nash, Jr., who revolutionized mathematics and struggled with mentally illness. More than 40 years later, as he edged back into sanity, his contribution was recognized by academics in Sweden. They awarded him the Nobel Prize.

Is It Any Good?

This is an extraordinary story, and it has been made into an extraordinary movie. Crowe is, as always, simply magnificent in a role that would provide irresistible temptation for showboating for most actors. There are superb performances by everyone in the cast, including Connelly (an Oscar-winner for Best Supporting Actress), Paul Bettany , Ed Harris , Christopher Plummer , Judd Hirsch , and a dozen others.

What is really special here is the way that screenwriter Akiva Goldman and director Ron Howard have found a way to present both Nash's genius and his mental illness in such compelling, cinematic, and accessible terms. Both in essence become characters in the story as we go inside his head and wonder with Nash what to believe. This is what makes the movie more than a disease-of-the-week special with color-by- numbers "heartwarming" moments of triumph over adversity. This is what makes the movie itself a true work of art.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about mental illness, about how people with mental illness need to be treated, and about what is different now in the way we treat the mentally ill from the days depicted in the movie. Families who want to know more should check the Web site for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 21, 2001
• On DVD or streaming : May 27, 2003
• Cast : Ed Harris , Jennifer Connelly , Russell Crowe
• Director : Ron Howard
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 135 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : intense thematic material, sexual content and a scene of violence.
• Last updated : April 26, 2024

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; From Math To Madness, And Back

By A. O. Scott

• Dec. 21, 2001

IN ''A Beautiful Mind,'' her biography of the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., Sylvia Nasar quotes one of his colleagues: ''All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes.'' Mr. Nash, whose life is a case study in the difficulty -- and also the wonder -- of living in both, now inhabits a third: the treacle palace of middlebrow Hollywood moviemaking, in which ambiguity is dissolved in reassuring platitudes and freshly harvested tears.

The tears, and the dazzled glow that accompanies them, feel honestly earned. The paradox of Ron Howard's new film, from a script by Akiva Goldsman, is that the story that elicits these genuine emotions is almost entirely counterfeit.

At one point, Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), the M.I.T. student who will marry Nash, breezes into his office, brandishing a proof she has devised for a fiendishly difficult hypothesis. Her professor and future husband looks up from the paper coffee cup he is chewing on and glances at her work. ''It's elegant, but wrong,'' he says, delivering a verdict that could just as well apply to ''A Beautiful Mind.''

Let's work backward, from wrong to elegant. Mr. Nash, now 73, an inordinately gifted, deeply awkward man, possesses one of the most extraordinary mathematical intellects of his generation. By his early 30's, when mental illness overwhelmed his creative powers, he had done important work in a number of fields, including game theory, quantum mechanics and number theory. After three decades of struggle with schizophrenia, he was granted what seemed like a miraculous remission. In 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic science for work he had done as a graduate student at Princeton in the late 1940's.

In outline then Mr. Nash's life has the perfect three-act structure of a screenplay: a sparkling career derailed by adversity and redeemed by a triumph of the spirit. In detail the life, as recounted by Ms. Nasar, a former economics reporter for The New York Times, is a trove of fascinating, troubling information. In a profession whose members have a reputation for oddness, Mr. Nash was a prime number. He was notorious among his colleagues for his antisocial temperament and his predilection for cruel put-downs and dangerous practical jokes.

Before he married Alicia, with whom he had a son named John, he fathered another child, also named John, with a woman named Eleanor Stiers, and abandoned both mother and child to poverty. He formed a number of intense, apparently sexual bonds with other men, and he lost his security clearance and his position at the RAND Corporation after he was arrested for soliciting sex in a men's room in Santa Monica, Calif. When his illness became intractable and his behavior intolerable, Alicia divorced him. (They remarried last June.)

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A Beautiful Mind Reviews

When I think of the phrase “Oscar bait,” an expression I’m honestly not fond of, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind is the first movie I always think of.

Full Review | Jun 27, 2023

Nash's character is perfectly suited to Crowe's ability to charm and confuse at the same moment.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 26, 2021

Its inspirational qualities to read more about the real John Nash (and all the things omitted from this biopic) might be the only lasting effect.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Sep 25, 2020

Howard's A Beautiful Mind works because it is not a film about mental illness, but a film about John Nash.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 2, 2020

Profoundly, exhaustingly mediocre, a fussily overdone bit of mindless prestige filmmaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 24, 2019

Granted, it's uplifting to see mental illness portrayed on the screen in a humane fashion and world-class intellectuals elevated to heroic status. But A Beautiful Mind feels contrived from beginning to end, a paint-by-the-numbers biography.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Feb 21, 2019

This is stirring and absorbing stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 21, 2019

As competent, affecting biopics go, Mind won't win any prizes, but you've earned yourself the right for more awards consideration, mate.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2019

A Beautiful Mind isn't really interested in Nash's thoughts, let alone anyone else's.

Ultimately the message is banal and rather repellent: brainwork wrecks your health.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2018

Jennifer Connelly [works]. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2018

You've gotta hand it to Howard. He and A Beautiful Mind got me (and I bet will get you) interested in this subject for the first time since "new math" ruined it for most of us in high school.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 27, 2018

Crowe is called upon to do not much more than stare solicitously at the heavens, from where inspiration duly arrives, to the accompaniment of some predictably celestial music.

Full Review | Oct 21, 2014

You're well into the story before you can sift the facts from the hallucinations, a process that's made compelling by Russell Crowe's performance in the lead.

The second, idealised, sentimentalised half of the film is torture, as we plod through the routine I'm-here-to-help psychiatrist, the walls plastered with cut-up newspapers and the what-happens-when-he-stops-taking-the-medicine stuff.

The story also comes up with a clever way for Nash to fight his problem: He uses his mind. His illness is a puzzle, after all, and he's good at figuring out puzzles. You'll root for him.

Despite problems of structure and tone, and some crucial omissions from Nash's actual life, A Beautiful Mind has emerged as one of the season's most enjoyable and popular films.

A Beautiful Mind is Howard's best movie, and easily one of the best movies of the year.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2014

A Beautiful Mind is the best film yet from director Howard.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 4, 2014

It's not a crime for the script to gloss over the thornier aspects of Nash's story, but the film seems totally unconvincing, squeezing a real life into a formula that's simultaneously more palatable and less interesting.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Metacritic reviews

A beautiful mind.

• 100 Time Richard Schickel Time Richard Schickel The result is mainstream moviemaking at its highest, most satisfying level.
• 100 San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann Inspiring and largely unsentimental, this is as much a love story as a tale of courage.
• 88 Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington Though the role might seem a real stretch for an actor who just won an Oscar for his Charlton Heston turn as Maximus in "Gladiator," he and the movie ace the test.
• 88 Boston Globe Jay Carr Boston Globe Jay Carr The film makes more apparent than ever that Howard is quite underrated as a filmmaker, possibly because he's been hidden in full view in the mainstream for so long.
• 83 Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum Crowe sometimes summons up one of the most powerful depictions of mental illness I have ever seen with barely an eyelid flicker separating manifestations of sickness from utterly sane displays of creative concentration.
• 80 Slate David Edelstein Slate David Edelstein As Nash gets closer to Crowe's own age (and level of dissipation), the performance settles down and becomes first credible and then overwhelming. This is a stupendous piece of acting.
• 75 Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea What began as a bold and thrilling story descends into Hollywood cliché. But Crowe and Connelly's work rises above the mush. They make A Beautiful Mind go.
• 70 Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern Howard, and the screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman, have used the book as nothing more than their jumping-off point for an erratic work of fiction that's part mystery thriller and part Hollywood schmaltz.
• 50 Washington Post Desson Thomson Washington Post Desson Thomson Instead of an originally conceived movie that reflects Nash's troubled but brilliant mind, we have one of those formulaically rendered Important Subject movies -- the kind that seem exclusively designed for Best Picture nominations.
• 50 Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt While it's a splendidly acted film, A Beautiful Mind is also a wasted opportunity.
• See all 33 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for A Beautiful Mind

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