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.
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.
New Statesman
October 21, 2014
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.
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.
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 result is one of the most successful attempts to make math look sexy, even if the movie strays - gallops, really - from the details of the actual life of Nobel Prize-winner John Forbes Nash Jr.
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.