Mostly connect the dots. Almost all of the characters are one dimensional. Interesting portrayal of mental illness, but mostly we have Russell Crowe and nobody else. The fellow who played his college roommate was lively, but that was about it.
I've heard the biography tells an interesting and messy story. This doesn't.
On degaying: It was more than de-gaying. It was ignoring a relationship with his wife that ten times more complicated than the movie suggests, and creating a "gosh, times were tough, but she stood by her man" romantic love story.
If Howard wanted to shape the story that strongly, he should have created a fictional character, completely delinked from Nash's name and the particulars of his story. Instead, we get four or give key events that really happened (attended Princeton, came up with powerful theory, went crazy, learned to deal with his illness, wins the Nobel Prize), the middle part showing his illness, and a romantic love story.
Left out was the guy's attraction to men, his child by another woman, and the fact that Nash and wife divorced years ago. They are now friends.
In the Slate movie round-up, Ebert said that this didn't bother him. If he didn't know any facts about Nash's life, and had just seen the movie as strictly a fiction, it would have still revealed some basic "truth" with this story. I think Edelstein (?), the Slate reviwer, disagreed. A.O. Scott from the NY Times, strongly disagreed.
I haven't read the biography of Nash which got the movie producers excited about the story, but I understand that its author managed to capture much of the ocmplexity of this man's life.
I don't know how closely the biography tracks the characters that real life Nash encountered during his illness, but one of them could have easily signified his attraction to men. Without spoiling the O Henry twist, if you have seen the movie it would be easy to figure out which character could have been one that also included same sex attraction, at least on Nash's part.
Somebody earlier commented on Pollack as a similar movie about genious and decline. I agree that P is a much better movie. Marsha Gay Hardin potrayed a living, breathing character to match Ed Harris' tour de force example of a deteriorating artist. Almost all the other actors besides Crowe in "Mind" were wasted on roles that were entirely superfilous. My one exception would be his college roommate. At least at the beginning, that fellow actually came across as a real person (a cute one, I might add).
If one is telling the story strictly from the Schizophrenic's point of view, I can see where the other characters would be more flat and one dimensional.
But I think Howard tries to have it both ways, a unique take in a movie on one's mental illness, and a romantic love story as a sop to the audience that might be turned off by not having sympathetic characters.
But that carries a danger of patronizing the mentally ill person, stripping him or her (think of Rush) to being a cute child-like genious that is loved by a good woman (again think of Rush).
The complexity of such a life, and of dealing or caring for such a person, would suggest that Howard, by creating a simple love story, took an easy way out.
