To one degree or another, we all understand through intuition the encoded language of filmmaking. We absorb it subliminally, and sometimes quite consciously, just watching and observing devices. We pick up mood signals, for example, from chilling or jaunty music; a zoom shot to a character’s face may tell us something has dawned on him; a familiar sequence of shots – a couple frolicking in park settings to the title theme – cues us that they’re officially in love. I didn’t know a thing about mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. going into “A Beautiful Mind,” save the fact that as the central character he’d be played by Russell Crowe. And yet for 134 highly watchable minutes, Nash’s life – at least as re-tooled for a glossy American movie – passed before my eyes as if it were a picture I’d already watched the night before. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that most foreign films, made quicker and cheaper and with fewer box-office concerns, often are raggedly underencoded; foreign scenes often lack resonance because they haven’t been set up texturally. Bad because nearly every American film biography feels as if it were processed through the same blender, which leaves us helplessly anticipating developments in a life we know nothing about. “A Beautiful Mind” spans 1947-94, concentrating on the first 10 years and making quantum leaps in the last reel. Akiva Goldsman’s screenplay, adapted from Sylvia Nasar’s book, introduces John Nash (Russell Crowe) as a West Virginian newly ensconced at Princeton. Brilliant and eccentric, John can be obtuse about social skills. As if the most rudimentary interaction were beyond him, he blurts out unprovoked criticisms of one student’s math, another’s necktie. It was no stretch for the surly Crowe, playing a teen-age gang member in “Romper Stomper” a decade ago, to bully his peers mercilessly, but as the well-manicured, awkward intellectual in “A Beautiful Mind,” his thoughtlessness sends a counter signal: The real Nash is almost certainly a much more ordinary looking guy – not one with the peer potential of the ruggedly handsome Crowe. What the actor does much more plausibly is establish John’s clumsy motor skills – his skittishness, his jerking neck and the tentative steps of an uncoordinated little boy who doesn’t seem sure he wants to arrive anywhere. The movie never lets us get a good fix on what John succeeds and fails at except that he lacks interpersonal adaptiveness and that he wants to establish himself in math by introducing some sort of original thinking. British roommate Charles (Paul Bettany) helps him loosen up. But John is more readily distracted by William Parcher (Ed Harris), a Defense Department operative who enlists him to crack Russian codes. In no time John is scanning major American magazines and newspapers for hidden patterns in the words – secret Communist codes – and being praised by William as “the best natural code breaker I have ever seen.” Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), a student of his who was to become his wife of many decades, is introduced and developed in such conventional movie terms that she saps the film’s energy (at least in the first half) whenever she appears. The movie gets sparks from the moments that distinguish it – John’s impatience with teaching and relating to others and the debilitating encroachment of his schizophrenic paranoia. One of director Ron Howard’s savviest touches is his use of film noir photography and lighting – shooting John in shadows and through Venetian blinds – once mental troubles kick in. Crowe projects tellingly the disintegration of a fine mind and the quest for self-restoration. His is a much more interesting performance than the one that got him an Oscar in “Gladiator”; it’s on the level of his conflicted portrayals in “The Insider” and “L.A. Confidential.” It’s not his fault that the movie assumes we won’t be able to grasp even the most generalized information about John’s mathematical achievements or what was involved in the revolutionary economic theory mentioned in the epilogue. Or that the film’s focus doesn’t leave much time for his relationships with Professor Helinger (Judd Hirsch), the psychiatrist Dr. Rosen (Christopher Plummer) or the admiring Thomas King (Austin Pendleton). What there is is very professionally packaged for mass consumption – a pleasing, if somewhat overly standardized, uplift in the spirit of “Shine,” “Good Will Hunting” and “Finding Forrester.”

‘A Beautiful Mind’

Director: Ron Howard Stars: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense tehmatic material, sexual content and a scene of violence

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