A Beautiful Performance
- or Two
by Don Larsson

Kate & Leopold is being touted as a "return to romance" or "proof that chivalry isn't dead" - the kind of reviewer babble that we get hit with about once a decade. (I can recall when Love Story - the movie - made the cover of Time as "evidence" of this kind of thing.) But Hugh Jackman does give the film a powerful boost. After a disappointing outing in Someone Like You, it was unclear whether Jackman would be able to follow up on his strong American debut in X-Men or whether he could stretch beyond action films. Here at least, he's the sole reason to see the movie.

Jackman plays Leopold, an English "count" who has followed a twenty-first century adventurer (Liev Schrieber, in a thoroughly wasted role) from the year 1876 back to our century through a "crack in time" near the Brooklyn Bridge. Schrieber is quickly tucked out of the way by the screenwriters so that Leopold can develop a relationship with Schrieber's ex-girlfriend and current neighbor, Kate (Meg Ryan). Kate is one of those career women we meet in the movies who is hungry to move to the top of her firm but really seems to want a Relationship. Naturally, she disbelieves Leopold's supposed status as time-traveller, but becomes charmed by his old-fashioned ways: courting, rather than bedding; pulling out chairs at dinner tables; standing when a lady leaves the table, that sort of thing. It's no wonder that she's attracted to him, since she is on the outs with Schrieber and has no one else to pine for but her boss (The West Wing's Bradley Whitford) - an unlikeable cold fish executive.

And so things progress, pretty much as you would expect them to. Kate is liberated (and stupid) enough to pursue a purse-snatcher through Central Park, but it is Leopold who literally rides to the rescue on a white horse. It is no spoiler to say that the two wind up happily together. Jackman handles the courtesy and the accent quite well and has a presence that fills and redeems every scene that he's in. Ryan is adequate in her role and she doesn't flip her hair and smirk too much, but she's done this kind of thing so many times that there's no new territory here, except for a dynamite executive wardrobe that might appeal to Aubrey Beardsley.

This kind of time warp romance was done much better years ago in Time After Time, among others. What really galls me about the film, in fact, is its smugness about its supposed historical knowledge. We are told that Leopold is an advanced thinker for his day (working on inventing the elevator - the Otis Company apparently gave its permission for this liberty with the facts), but director James Mangold and his co-screenwriter Steven Rogers make no serious attempt to examine the disparity between the present and the past, which, as they say in The Go-Between, "is a foreign country; people do things differently there." While there's a nice moment when Leopold lands in the present and is befuddled by high-rises, electricity, and a TV channel showing that giant bubble chasing Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, he adjusts all too quickly. The best joke in the film is the one in trailers where he is instructed to pick up after a dog. But wouldn't seeing an African American policewoman give him as much pause as those instructions?

All of this is standard enough for a Hollywood film, and might be more forgiveable if the film did not flaunt its own ignorance. Leopold is amazed to see the outcome of Edison's "incandescent lamp," which was invented three years (1879) after Leopold had left the past. So too, he teaches a young boy to sing "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General," but The Pirates of Penzance first performed in 1879. And in the dumbest example of all, Leopold traps Kate's boss in a self-serving lie. The boss claims that he loves opera and learned French from watching La Boheme. Leopold correctly informs him that the opera is in Italian (duh!), but it's not clear how it can be his favorite opera either - it wasn't composed until 1899!

So a film that might have been funny in unusual ways, if not outright clever about distinctions between past and present, becomes another example of writers' laziness and bad fact-checkers. See it for Jackman if you must, but you're better off staying home and reading that invaluable guide to Victorian manners and mores, Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew.

A Beautiful Mind is a much better film, all in all, than Kate & Leopold, but it still benefits most strongly from its lead male performance. This is a quasi-biographical film about John Forbes Nash (played by Russell Crowe), who would eventually win a Nobel Prize for groundbreaking work in mathematical "game theory," but has had to cope with paranoid schizophrenia for most of his adult life.

I'm as mathematically challenged as most people who try to wrestle with checkbooks and interest rates, but I've always been interested in those who probe the abstract realms of symbolic knowledge. Despite Nash's own disavowals, I can't help wondering if there's some deeper connection between Nash's theory and his life. However, a real exploration of that kind of thing would have resulted in a very different (and probably not commercially viable) film. The only director I can think of who might be able to tackle something like this is Erroll Morris, or maybe Alain Resnais.

But this is a Ron Howard film, for better or worse. The worse is that the intellectual issues get sidetracked, and the complications of Nash's life get smoothed out. The better is that it is a coherent story that manages to give some kind of visual and narrative form to Nash's thought, life, and mental disease. While the film gives little sense of Nash's own background - going from a West Virginia mining community to graduate study at Princeton - it gives his adult life a solid but not overweening Cold War-era setting. Fear of the Soviet Union winds up financing Nash's career both directly and indirectly, while McCarthyism provides the form for Nash's growing paranoia to fill. It would have been easy to overstate these contexts and blow them up disproportionately, but the film just drops hints and reminders here and there to keep the focus on Nash's own mind.

Crowe may be the one actor around right now who is best suited to this kind of role. He's always had an intense inwardness in his screen roles and his public persona, sometimes displaying (or masking?) itself as arrogance, yet always suggesting something deeper, darker, more private. Sometimes, both of those sides emerge in his screen character, as they did in L.A. Confidential. Here, his Nash is the flip side of his Maximus in Gladiator. As Nash himself has said, the greatest mathematicians have often been withdrawn, self-isolated, and downright eccentric. (A campus curmudgeon of my acquaintance was a mathematician who boasted that he spent his free time thinking in equations!) So it seems natural that when the film's Nash arrives at Princeton, he comes off as an arrogant loner, staking his graduate education and career on the risky chance of finding a unique and beautiful concept that no one else has found yet. Logical to a fault in public, Crowe's Nash sees no point in wasting his time by going to classes or doing the background work in class that he feels his own students should do on their own. Even when trying to pick up a woman at a bar, he wants to avoid the chatter and cut to the chase right away - a technique that doesn't do much for him. But his own connections to the military establishment and the Cold War cultural paranoia of the time only reinforce his own inwardness.

Eventually, the genuine eccentricities sift themselves out from truly delusional behavior. It's the portrayal of that behavior that is one of the film's weakest points. Howard literalizes Nash's delusions. Characters and situations that at first seem real are shown to be constructions of Nash's madness. (Some are revealed more quickly than others). The technique is dramatically effective but not logically convincing. Actual schizophrenic delusions that are manifested in Nash's disarranged ramblings, clippings from magazines, and so on, are far messier and murkier than in the material form that they're given. At the same time, such a technique does manage to avoid most of the film clichés about madness seen only from an exterior point of view.

Nash's personal as well as inner life is tidied up quite a bit. One expects a film biography to combine some things, ignore or gloss over others, but Nash's biography is even more complex than the film suggests, passing over several love relationships, and his arrest in a raid on a gay bar, among other things. Jennifer Connelly, as a student of Nash who becomes his lover and wife, starts off strongly but is far less convincing in later scenes. Part of that is due to the way her own character is written: a very smart woman pursuing mathematics at MIT (highly unusual in itself for the time), she becomes much more of a stock nurturing figure by the end of the film. No hint is given of Nash's wife's actual Central American origin.

With those reservations, I don't think that I would put A Beautiful Mind on my 10 of the Better list for 2001, but it does deserve an Honorable Mention. Most of the credit for that should go to Crowe, with another nod to Roger Deakins' cinematography. With this film and his wonderful evocation of film noir in The Man Who Wasn't There, Deakins has done some of this year's best photographic work.

©2002 Don Larsson
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