Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind is a mildly attractive Hollywood drama thanks in no small part to the excellent lead performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. Based ever so loosely on the life of brilliant but mentally troubled mathematician John Nash, Jr., Mind is a film that has an equal amount of merits and debits.

The film opens in 1947 at Princeton University, where the West Virginian math genius has arrived thanks to a graduate fellowship. Nash is a whiz at numbers but has a bit more trouble socially ('I'm a well-balanced person', he quips early on. 'I have a chip on both my shoulders.'). He spends most of his school years by himself, searching for "one original idea" (he would never have made it in Hollywood) that will allow him to make his mark on the world. The only thing that search seems to yield is concern from his adviser, Helinger (Judd Hirsch). This quest almost costs John his fellowship, but eventually he does come across the idea. This lands him a job at M.I.T., where he meets and falls in love with his future wife, a student named Alicia (Connelly).

It also lands him a top-secret code breaking assignment with the United States Government. Working with a spy by the name of Parcher (Ed Harris), Nash begins to decipher the codes being sent by the Soviets to their operatives within America. Before long, the work begins to take its toll both on Nash and his marriage, as he believes that more and more the Soviets are coming after him. Or are they?

For approximately three quarters of its running time, A Beautiful Mind works. It's a compelling drama, one that showcases a rather restrained directorial turn from Howard (well, restrained in comparison to his last film, How The Grinch Stole Christmas). This is some of his best work since 1995's Apollo 13. Akiva Goldsman's screenplay does a commendable job in pulling us into Nash's world, exploring what makes him tick and what drives him to find that "one original idea". It also handles Nash's descent into mental illness evenhandedly. While the darker aspects of Nash's life, found in Sylvia Nasar's biography, have been given the Hollywood whitewash to make the story more acceptable for mainstream audiences, the first two acts do make for solid drama.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. The third act, dealing with Nash in his later years, slides the production right into the predictable maudlin territory it had so smartly avoided for most of its running time. Having A Beautiful Mind turn into something along the lines of Mr. Nash's Nutty Opus robs the film of a certain amount of its credibility. It leaves us with a drama that is good but nowhere near as great as it could have (and should have) been.

The performances by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, however, never falter. Despite looking a bit too old to be a college student in the film's beginning, Crowe immerses himself into the role of Nash with his trademark intensity and conviction, delivering yet another stunner of a performance that comes close to rivaling his work in 1999's The Insider (which I still think is his best work to date). Connelly follows up her powerful work in Requiem For A Dream with another winning turn here as Alicia. She delivers a winning combination of brains, beauty and inner strength to a role that could easily have been written off as the clichéd long-suffering wife. Both turn in acting worthy of nominations if not an award or two.

In the supporting roles, Paul Bettany comes off best as Nash's college roommate, Charles, while Christopher Plummer is also quite good in his brief turn as Nash's doctor, Dr. Rosen. Ed Harris, rather surprisingly, comes off rather flat as Parcher. Decent work, but not quite up to the level one usually expects from a great actor such as Harris.

Had Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman actually had the chutzpah to tell Nash's story in a truthful and straightforward manner, then A Beautiful Mind would have really soared both as a drama and as a "triumph of the human spirit" tale. It would probably also have been a small, independent film that few would have seen. As it stands though, it's a decent mainstream drama that showcases two excellent lead performances.

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