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DVD: A pretty good memory
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 27, 2002
A Beautiful Mind (two-disc awards edition)
[Photo: Universal Studios]
Alicia (played by Jennifer Connelly) tries to communicate with her husband, schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash (Russell Crowe) in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
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Something tells me that posterity won't be as kind to Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind as Academy Awards voters were three months ago. It's a very good movie, brilliant at times, but so were many other best-picture Oscar winners that now are mainly trivia answers, such as The Last Emperor, Out of Africa, Driving Miss Daisy and Ordinary People.
Nothing wrong with that, but pause and wonder if film buffs 20 years from now will point to A Beautiful Mind as a standard of excellence for other filmmakers to match. Gangster movies have The Godfather, weepy melodramas have Terms of Endearment and Kramer vs. Kramer and war movies have The Deer Hunter and Platoon for starters. Nobody seriously considers Oliver! and Gigi as the best examples of movie musicals. How many moviegoers cherish the memories of Gandhi and Chariots of Fire? A Beautiful Mind probably will settle into the mid-range of respect, somewhere around the level of Rain Man and Tom Jones.
Howard's biography of schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash, played to full effect by Russell Crowe, is now on DVD with a special awards package crammed with extras befitting an Oscar winner. Disc 1 features a widescreen transfer of the movie, plus a few insignificant deleted scenes. Howard and producer Brian Grazer provide an audio commentary without much spark, while screenwriter Akiva Goldsman adds another, answering complaints of his exclusion of factors in Nash's life -- alleged anti-Semitism and homosexuality, which didn't make the final draft.
Disc 2 includes a featurette profiling Howard's and Grazer's longtime partnership, and their decisions to cast Crowe and best supporting actress Jennifer Connelly as Nash and his wife, Alicia. Behind the scenes footage illustrates the development of makeup that aged the actors 40 years, special effects suggesting the way Nash's brain operated and James Horner's musical score. Storyboards, a preview trailer and a making-of documentary are standard bonuses.
The disc fascinates when the real Nash is shown, videotaped by Howard while he offered a crash course in his Nobel Prize-winning theory of equilibrium. The sound quality is poor and Nash rambles, but it's interesting to compare Crowe's performance with his subject. A clip showing Nash accepting his 1994 Nobel Prize in Stockholm proves that Howard's staging of a teary acceptance speech was pure fantasy for a feel-good ending.
Rounding out the collection are video clips from the Academy Awards telecast with Howard, Grazer, Connelly and Goldsman accepting their prizes. Twenty years from now, those clips may be necessary for moviegoers to recall that it ever happened.
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