A Beautiful Mind

Crowe gives beaut performance in Mind

With his rugged he-man good looks, Russell Crowe is a leading man both sexes can get behind. Men enjoy his seemingly invulnerable tough guy heroics while women like him for pretty much the same thing -- especially if he does it in a little skirt like he did in most of Gladiator, his Best Actor Academy Award-winning performance. Of course, everyone can appreciate the beautiful talent that won Crowe that Oscar. This strapping import from Down Under perfectly complements the current celestial canyon of Hollywood leading man superstars like Everyman Tom Hanks, thespian/box-office über-superstar Tom Cruise, and golden boy Brad Pitt (careful fellas, Clooney is closing in on you).

Even before Gladiator certified Crowe as an action movie hunk who can actually act, Crowe was making memorable impressions in small films like Romper Stomper and The Swan of Us before eventually landing breakthrough star-making Hollywood roles in L.A. Confidential (as the tough cop with a heart of gold) and The Insider (his first Oscar nomination -- and to be honest, the one he should have won for -- as the big tobacco 60 Minutes whistleblower Jeffrey Weigand). Hard to believe this is the same actor who started his Hollywood career as the cyber-villain in the 1995 Denzel Washington dud Virtuosity, but Crowe has come a long way since then and he continues his winning ways with a beauty of a performance in A Beautiful Mind.

Based on a true story, Crowe gives another Academy Award worthy performance in A Beautiful Mind as John Forbes Nash Jr., the brilliant mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate who battled debilitating paranoid schizophrenia throughout his life even as he came up with mind-blowing economic theories and helped the Pentagon crack Russian code during the cold war. Crowe's Nash is one of the those guys who is so incredibly smart that he has no social graces or common sense -- he's rude and behaves like Forrest Gump's cousin (until he opens his mouth) -- so it's a wonder when Nash finds a woman willing to put up with his tortured genius and lack of manners, but he finds her as a student in one of his classes at Princeton where Nash taught. Nash is so inept with women that she has to ask him out, but Alicia (played with luminous conviction by Jennifer Connelly) falls in love with Nash, marries him, and stands by him in his most darkest mentally unhinged hours, even when she learns that much of what he's told her about his life has been a schizophrenic delusion. Crowe and Connelly have great chemistry together, playing their characters with the conviction that true love can conquer all, even a brilliant man's mental demons.

Of course, the American Psychiatric Institute might have a problem with the idea that love and a man's own personal strength is enough to help one conquer a dangerous mental illness like schizophrenia, but one of the most intriguing aspects of A Beautiful Mind, scripted by Akiva Goldsman, is that the drugs Nash was prescribed to help fight his mental illness dulled his senses so badly that he was unable to put his beautiful mind to use or even make love with his wife. The film raises the provocative question, should someone take a pill to help them feel better, even though it could destroy everything that person was about -- in Nash's case, chemicals diluting a man's genius. This is some heavy stuff for a movie from Ron Howard, a director better known for his escapist popcorn films like Splash, Backdraft, Ransom, and The Grinch than he is serious drama, but A Beautiful Mind marks a real step forward for Howard as a filmmaker, even if he can't help himself but to add a Sixth Sense-style twist to the film to make it more mainstream. Howard's mainstream sensibilities however, don't distract from the compelling performances given by Crowe and Connelly, which make them Academy Award front-runners this year. They make A Beautiful Mind one of the most memorable movies of 2001.