A Beautiful Mind on DVD

(Editor's Note: When A Beautiful Mind beat Lord of the Rings for Best Picture and Best Director, our staff reviewer vowed to hate the movie because he felt "Rings" deserved both awards.

Now that he's seen A Beautiful Mind, however, he doesn't hate it, though he still feel Rings was more deserving.

Anyway, back to the reviewer's comments:

The film is about certain aspects of the life of John Nash (Russell Crowe), a brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning schizophrenic. It's actually more about a man's struggle with the disorder than a true biopic.

The movie starts with John arriving at college, and making friends with his "roommate," Charles (Paul Bettany). John is not the most socially graceful person on the planet, making more enemies than friends. But he's there to learn, and to show off his beautiful mind, so it doesn't really bother him.

Cut to a few years later, and he's now a professor at the school. One of his students, Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), asks him on a date, and they later get married. He also meets Parcher (Ed Harris), who enlists him as a "codebreaker" for the government.

It's around this time that we learn that John is suffering from schizophrenia. He believes he's being chased by foreign terrorists, who turn out to be something quite different. The rest of the movie is about John and Alicia Nash trying to cope with John's illness.

As much as I wanted to dislike this movie, I couldn't. It's very good, and I believe that if I hadn't have been so dead-set on hating it, I would have enjoyed it even more. Ron Howard has done an excellent job of directing the film, and it's nice to see him finally get some recognition from the Academy. And whether you love him or hate him, you can't deny that Crowe is a fine actor.

The supporting cast of Connelly, Harris, Bettany, and Christopher Plummer is great as well.

A Beautiful Mind took some criticism for not including certain parts of Nash's life, such as his homosexual experiments. I personally feel it was wise not to include them. First of all, the film is already two and a quarter hours long. But also, they wouldn't fit. The focus of the movie is his schizophrenia, and anything not relating to that would be superfluous (and would undoubtedly have been criticized for being such).

(the editor steps in again: So to hell with the homosexual lobby: A Beautiful Mind is about an illness, not a lifestyle choice or a "predisposition" or whatever they claim homosexuality is. And we can just imagine the fooforah that lobby would have put up if Nash's supposed "homosexual tendencies" were portrayed as an illness!)

A Beautiful Mind is a slow movie, but the end result is worth it. A solid story, great cast, and veteran director all make it that much better. It's a great Saturday night flick to sit down and watch with your better (or worse, in some cases) half.

This is also one of the most solid DVDs produced by Universal in a long time. A great picture and a mass of supplements are only slightly faltered by the less-than-spectacular audio.

The anamorphic widescreen picture is perfectly crisp and clear, but I did notice a bit of halo effect in some places. The darks are dark and the colors are just the right contrast. I didn't once notice any grain or other foreign objects, which is nice to see since studios sometimes let it slip by during scenes when they don't think you'll notice.

Unfortunately, Universal has disappointed me with their audio track again. First of all, I was shocked to see that A Beautiful Mind is not given a DTS track, when even crappy, direct-to-video releases get one. In their defense, they didn't really do much with the Dolby Digital track, so DTS would have been a waste of time and effort - but dammit, I want the choice! As is common, the audio is pretty much confined to the front speakers, with not much (if anything) creeping out of the surrounds. There are a few scenes that would have worked brilliantly with all five point one speakers, but alas, it was not to be. I also think it would have been a neat effect to have the voices of John's hallucinations coming from the rear speakers, while everyone else's comes from the front.

Extras on disc one include two separate commentaries; one by Ron Howard, the other by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, and over 25 minutes of deleted scenes, with or without commentary by Howard.

Disc two is loaded, featuring several short but interesting featurettes. The first is "A Beautiful Partnership: Ron Howard and Brian Grazer," running five minutes. "Development of the Screenplay" and "Meeting John Nash" are just over eight minutes each, and are both quite interesting. The latter features Ron Howard interviewing the real-life John Nash. "Accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics" is a brief clip of Nash accepting his award, and "Casting Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly" is exactly how it sounds. "The Process of Age Progression" and "Creation of the Special Effects" are entertaining featurettes on, of course, makeup and special effects. "Scoring the Film" is a five-minute discussion with James Horner on his approach to the music.

"Inside A Beautiful Mind" is a 22-minute commercial, typical of behind-the-scenes featurettes like this. It features some decent interviews, but is otherwise pretty pointless.

Finally, there are some Academy Award reactions from the winners, a commercial for the soundtrack, and a series of trailers.

A Beautiful Mind, from Universal Home Entertainment
136 minutes, anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) 16X9 enhanced, 5.1 Dolby Digital
Starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Judd Hirsch and Christopher Plummer
Produced by Brian Grazer, Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman
Directed by Ron Howard

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