She never gets old! Marcee can't be real; she never gets old!

A Beautiful Mind

(2001)

As Best Picture Oscar winners go, is there a more obvious example of a mediocre, heartwarming film serving up a fast-food illusion of depth and profundity? In a case of the bland leading the bland, Ron Howard directed Akiva Goldsman script, resulting in one of the most fatuous representations of mental illness to make it to the big screen. No wonder the Academy went wild for it.

I’ve said that I don’t think the mark of a film based on a historical incident or figure should be its faithfulness but, rather, its dramatic integrity. A Beautiful Mind is as good an example as any of failure at this. The film diverges significantly from John Nash’s experiences, both in terms of his life (be it his divorce and remarriage, alleged homosexual relationships, child from an earlier relationship, the mawkishly sentimental “captain, my captain” pen giving scene) and illness (he did not experience visual hallucinations, only aural, thought he was in contact with extra-terrestrials, experienced anti-Semitic episodes and took no medication from 1970 onwards), but the motivation for this is of the least laudable kind. Nash’s life is to be rendered palatable and anonymously heroic, with all the hard edges and dramatic meat scraped off.

As such, I’m sure there was a good film to be made from Nash’s troubled life. But reducing it to the most trite “triumph over adversity” formula serves no one but the moneymen. It’s not as if Howard and Goldsman persevere in ensuring the audience understands why the Nash equilibrium became so important; indeed, following the most bland of visual explanations for how Nash came up with the theory, Howard throws any interest in it away. In every case, Howard renders the workings of Nash’s mind in with an astonishingly patronising “madness for dummies” approach, which may just betray how Ronnie actually thinks. He also liberally sprinkles fairy dust on top; this man’s mind is so magical it requires the wondrousness of James Horner’s emotive piano to hammer home the point.

Goldsman, infamously, penned Batman & Robin before apparently redeeming himself with an Oscar win for this script. Yet nothing he has written since (save for his small screen work on Fringe) has suggested a man of hidden talents. His solution for telling Nash’s story (keeping the reality of his illness from both him and the viewer until a crucial moment) is fine if you’re disinterested in really understanding the man; if you’re cynical enough to use a twist structure as “shock treatment” for the viewer, to alert them to his mental state, you really shouldn’t be surprised at how your story comes up short in numerous other respects. As it is the sub-Fight Club element is plain cheap; like everything here it testifies to how low the bar has been set.

Tom Cruise was apparently lobbying for the part of Nash, but his previous form with Howard didn’t seem to curry sufficient favour and Russell Crowe scored the role. I’m not sure Cruise could have pulled it off, even given his experience with old pro Hoffman on Rain Man to draw on (by that comparison, I’m not foolishly comparing autism with mental illness but drawing attention to roles where the physical difference is the first thing you see, and tends to attract awards recognition – another example would be Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot). Certainly, Crowe gives a horribly mannered performance. There’s never any doubt that this is an actor trying to approximate the behaviour of someone who is schizophrenic, rather than “being” the role. Crowe was superb in his physical transformation for The Insider a few years previously, but Howard encourages only the broadest and most cartoonish version of Nash. The director is so unsubtle that, with the trio of “friends” he sees around every corner and the constant tinkling music, you’d think he was taking the piss if you didn’t know better.

The one bright spot is Jennifer Connelly as Nash’s wife. Somehow she finds a truthfulness and substance that lends the film a weight it scarcely deserves. She anchors Crowe’s flailing gurning and more than deserved her Oscar (both Crowe and Connelly appear in Goldsman’s upcoming directorial debut, Winter’s Tale).

For a while there, Howard was Hollywood’s brightest star of journeyman directors. His stylistic fingerprints are minimal, aside from an overpowering sense of well-meaning and an absence of intellectual curiosity. He has good, wholesome tastes and runs in the fastest opposite direction to anything provocative. But in the decade since Mind, he’s done little of merit (during the decade prior to it, there were a couple of above average movies like Apollo 13 and Ransom). Arguably the man who massacred the Grinch, and inflicted two crappy Robert Langdon “thrillers” on audiences has lost even the touch that ensured undemanding but serviceable fare. And Crowe’s steer cleared of anything stretching himself since (perhaps wisely), his vocal chords excepted (see A Good Year and Les Mis). As for Oscar, it is as poor an arbiter of quality as ever but even more so when it comes to sentimentalised disability.

Your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

Enemy Mine (1985) (SPOILERS) The essential dynamic of Enemy Mine – sworn enemies overcome their differences to become firm friends – was a well-ploughed one when it was made, such that it led to TV Tropes assuming, since edited, that it took its title from an existing phrase (Barry Longyear, author of the 1979 novella, made it up, inspired by the 1961 David Niven film The Best of Enemies ). The Film Yearbook Volume 5 opined that that Wolfgang Petersen’s picture “ lacks the gritty sauciness of Hell in the Pacific”; John Boorman’s WWII film stranded Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on a desert island and had them first duking it out before becoming reluctant bedfellows. Perhaps germanely, both movies were box office flops.

If I do nothing else, I will convince them that Herbert Stempel knows what won the goddam Academy Award for Best goddam Picture of 1955. That’s what I’m going to accomplish.

Quiz Show (1994) (SPOILERS) Quiz Show perfectly encapsulates a certain brand of Best Picture nominee: the staid, respectable, diligent historical episode, a morality tale in response to which the Academy can nod their heads approvingly and discerningly, feeding as it does their own vainglorious self-image about how times and attitudes have changed, in part thanks to their own virtuousness. Robert Redford’s film about the 1950s Twenty-One quiz show scandals is immaculately made, boasts a notable cast and is guided by a strong screenplay from Paul Attanasio (who, on television, had just created the seminal Homicide: Life on the Streets ), but it lacks that something extra that pushes it into truly memorable territory.

Say hello to the Scream Extractor.

Monsters, Inc. (2001) (SPOILERS) I was never the greatest fan of Monsters, Inc. , even before charges began to be levelled regarding its “true” subtext. I didn’t much care for the characters, and I particularly didn’t like the way Pixar’s directors injected their own parenting/ childhood nostalgia into their plots. Something that just seems to go on with their fare ad infinitum. Which means the Pixars I preferred tended to be the Brad Bird ones. You know, the alleged objectivist. Now, though, we learn Pixar has always been about the adrenochrome, so there’s no going back…

Other monks will meet their deaths here. And they too will have blackened fingers. And blackened tongues.

The Name of the Rose (1986) (SPOILERS) Umberto Eco wasn’t awfully impressed by Jean Jacques-Annaud’s adaptation of his novel – or “ palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel ” as the opening titles announce – to the extent that he nixed further movie versions of his work. Later, he amended that view, calling it “ a nice movie ”. He also, for balance, labelled The Name of the Rose his worst novel – “ I hate this book and I hope you hate it too ”. Essentially, he was begrudging its renown at the expense of his later “ superior ” novels. I didn’t hate the novel, although I do prefer the movie, probably because I saw it first and it was everything I wanted from a medieval Sherlock Holmes movie set in a monastery and devoted to forbidden books, knowledge and opinions.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

The Forgiven (2021) (SPOILERS) By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking in John’s work, and concomitantly less substance. The Forgiven is clearly aiming more in the expressly substantial vein of John’s earlier Calvary, but it ultimately bears the same kind of issues in delivery.

You ever heard the saying, “Don’t rob the bank across from the diner that has the best donuts in three counties”?

2 Guns (2013) (SPOILERS) Denzel Washington is such a reliable performer, that it can get a bit boring. You end up knowing every gesture or inflection in advance, whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy. And his films are generally at least half decent, so you end up seeing them. Even in Flight (or perhaps especially in Flight ; just watch him chugging down that vodka) where he’s giving it his Oscar-nominatable best, he seems too familiar. I think it may be because he’s an actor who is more effective the less he does. In 2 Guns he’s not doing less, but sometimes it seems like it. That’s because the last person I’d ever expect blows him off the screen; Mark Wahlberg.

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991) (SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.

In a few moments, you will have an experience that will seem completely real. It will be the result of your subconscious fears transformed into your conscious awareness.

Brainstorm (1983) (SPOILERS) Might Brainstorm have been the next big thing – a ground-breaking, game-changing cinematic spectacle that had as far reaching consequences as Star Wars (special effects) or Avatar (3D) – if only Douglas Trumbull had been allowed to persevere with his patented “Showscan” process (70mm film photographed and projected at 60 frames per second)? I suspect not; one only has to look at the not-so-far-removed experiment of Ang Lee with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and how that went down like a bag of cold sick, to doubt that any innovation will necessarily catch on (although Trumbull at least had a narrative hinge on which to turn his “more real than real” imagery, whereas Lee’s pretty much boiled down to “because it was there”). Brainstorm ’s story is, though, like its title, possibly too cerebral, too much concerned with the consciousness and touting too little of the cloyingly affirmative that Bruce Rubin inevitably brings to his screenplays. T

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989) (SPOILERS) There’s Jaws , there’s Star Wars , and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws ’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy , to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “ more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie ”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “ mainly boring ”. Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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