I just rented A Beautiful Mind this weekend. Overall, I thought it was really good. I like Ron Howard and went to high school with Jennifer Connelly, so I was very curious. I'd never thought she had a role that allowed people to tell if she was any good or not. In this, I thought she was excellent and the story was excellent, but I wasn't 100% there with the casting of Russell Crowe. I didn't think he looked bright enough to be a genius, but worse than that, he looked too fit. He's not ripped, but he's got obvious muscle tone that I had a hard time believing would generally belong to a super intense mind. However, the makeup and his acting seemed to work better as he became an older man in the movie, plus I got wrapped up enough in the story not to care as much.
I was intending to read up on John Nash. I had a feeling that he didn't actually see people in real life, since that's not really that common for schizophrenia, and I would have figured that anyone who had the disease as badly as that could never recover as well as he did. I did think that showing the people was a good touch for the movie, though. It helped me to relate to the confusion of his situation and even added a little bit of a comedic element at times.
