Why I think that the Academy did something right, for once.

Or, slightly more substantive ramblings than I offered here.

Spoilers for A Beautiful Mind follow. You have been warned.

I was very impressed with this movie. There are so many aspects to a film that it's extremely rare for one to succeed equally in all areas. Mrs. Brown, for example, is exquisitely acted, and the dialogue is very good, but there are some problems with the overall structure of the story, and often the only way you know that years are passing is the helpful subtitles "1861" or "1867" or what have you. A Beautiful Mind does not have that problem. Say what I will about Russell Crowe (and I can think of a number of things, starting with 'Get the hell over yourself'), he did very well in this role. Even though I had been hearing plenty of dirt on Russell Crowe by the time I saw the movie, and even though he made it quite clear that his character was not at all an easy person, he still made me root for him. While the movie was running, I stopped thinking about Russell Crowe.

I never felt like I caught the cast acting, which is, to me, the mark of a job well done.

This is the only film in which I've thought, while sitting in the theater, "Gosh, the make-up is fantastic!" Usually, it seems that no matter how wide a span of years is covered by a film, the characters look more or less the same until the last twenty minutes, at which point they vanish under a pile of latex. Here, the main characters of John and Alicia were aged gradually and subtly throughout the film, which meant that even before the Big Twist is revealed, the audience has a faint, indistinct sense that something is not right, because some characters are *not* aging like that.

The Big Twist. The wonderful thing about the They're-All-Hallucinations twist is that there's a purpose to it. In The Sixth Sense, the point of the twist was "Ha! Gotcha!" In A Beautiful Mind, it puts the audience in the same position as the main character. The movie is about what it's like to be inside John Nash's 'beautiful mind' - a mind that is brilliant, but also unreliable. And it's not a textbook here-are-the-theorems, here-are-the-symptoms account of brilliance and illness, but a qualitative portrait of striving, confusion, frustration, fear, and moments of pure EUREKA!

I think that's the thing that impresses me most about the movie - the way it hangs together. That everything - the story and the acting and the make-up design - all work together so coherently towards a specific end. Of course all movies work towards the end of 'telling the story,' but I've never sat in my chair at the end of a film and felt that it built so cogently and successfully to a specific goal.

Many people have complained that Beautiful Mind is the purest Oscar-mongering triumph-of-the-human-spirit tripe. And maybe I'm just a sucker. But if it's tripe, it's the best-constructed, most uniformly well-executed, most cogent tripe I've ever seen. And despite my affection for Gosford Park and Fellowship, I was pleased when Beautiful Mind won best picture.

I would also have been pleased if Moulin Rouge won, but that discussion will have to wait for later.