[Deep Focus]
A Beautiful Mind
B

Looks good in a T-shirt

Movie Credits:

Directed by Ron Howard

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman

Based on the book by Sylvia Nasar

Cinematography by Roger Deakins

Edited by Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill

Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly and Ed Harris

USA, 2001

DVD aspect ratio: 1.85:1

DVD image format: 16:9


A Beautiful Mind is probably best appreciated as a grand example of Hollywood filmmaking, with all the connotations of that phrase. I'm not sure anybody is really working in this idiom anymore, other than Ron Howard. Steven Spielberg seems to have anointed himself as the patron filmmaker of Our Dystopian Future, and Coppola has long dabbled in irrelevance. Altman is too cranky (and, with his Gosford Park, too, well, British) to qualify, Fincher too grim and willfully experimental.

But A Beautiful Mind is a veritable Sears catalog of simple pleasures. Against all odds, Russell Crowe fashions a credible loony mathematician (the crazy haircut he sports at one point helps) out of his somber gaze and movie-star physique. Congratulations to all the ladies who have a math professor who looks as good in a form-fitting T-shirt as this dude. Congrats, too, to any college man lucky enough to share a classroom with Jennifer Connelly, who in her very first scene announces herself as The Love Interest with a very contemporary haircut and independent-woman attitude that sets her apart from the uniformly 50s-dowdy who populate the rest of the classroom.

No wonder the two of 'em get along so well-they're a veritable Venus and Adonis, and if that bothers you, you probably have a problem with Hollywood in general. Crowe's give-me-an-Oscar role has him suffering from the nettlesome schizophrenia that afflicted John Nash, on whom his character is based. In Hollywood terms, this means that he suffers from flashy hallucinations involving car chases, government codebreaking and a cranky Ed Harris. And, in Hollywood, how can that not be a good thing?

Where Howard goes wrong here turns out to be where he goes wrong in all of his films, unleashing the cheapest possible varieties of sentiment and jeopardy. This time, after spending about an hour driving a lovely and restrained story of love, mathematics, and some pleasantly offbeat hallucinations, Howard veers across the old double-yellow and sends his film careering toward a fiery collision with schmaltz and melodrama. The unintentially hilarious baby-in-the-bathtub scene was my first indication that Howard was up to his old tricks, and it put me at an incredulous remove from the rest of Nash's story.

Further, if you investigate the real circumstances of John Nash's life, you'll find that Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (he wrote Batman and Robin for Joel Schumacher, who is a very Hollywood director, just not a very good one) took some sizable liberties with the story, not just to make it movie-friendly, but also to candy-coat Nash's character. The result is a facile character study dwelling on one man's descent into and triumph over schizophrenia that plays with too much love-conquers-all optimism.

All that aside, it really is a splendidly entertaining piece of work with uniformly warm performances and some occasionally neat visuals that show Howard honestly trying to expand his cinematic vocabulary. It's a heartening development for a director whom I had decided to more or less ignore not so long ago.

Universal has issued this in a self-congratulatory "two-disc awards edition" padded to the point of nausea with extra materials featuring the filmmakers sounding off on how hugely talented they and their collaborators are. Universal used to make terrific DVD special editions (try Twelve Monkeys and Psycho on for size), but lately they've been releasing junk that simultaneously panders to a mass market and serves a pure marketing function for the studio PR flacks. In case you missed the worldwide Oscarcast, disc two includes a variety of unremarkable footage of various ABM personnel collecting their little bronze men and/or talking about it afterward. To be fair, there is also some footage of an older John Nash explaining his theories to Ron Howard that is priceless, as well as an interesting look at Nash collecting his Nobel Prize (no, he didn't actually give a speech). We also get a 10-minute look at Digital Domain's mostly seamless special effects work-among other things, it explains why the aforementioned baby scene looks so dopey. Each supplement is introduced with a little encomium to the folks involved by Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer, whose mugs even the biggest fans might get sick of seeing by the time they navigate through this disc. I wonder if it would have been so hard to shoehorn the most relevant portions of this lengthy supplement onto a single disc.

Disc one is quite a bit better, boasting as it does a terrific transfer of the film, giving a really good sense of Roger Deakins' rich cinematography, with a restrained 5.1 Dolby Digital sound mix that convincingly recreates the ambience of the busy Princeton campus where much of the film's key action unfolds. Some of the deleted scenes are interesting, showing Howard developing adventurous visual ideas that would eventually be abandoned. And Howard's commentary is surprisingly good as these things go, explaining some of the information he processed in his effort to create a visual depiction of Nash's particular genius. It's not good enough, however, to warrant giving him his own track alongside a completely separate commentary by Goldsman. Editing the best bits of the two together would have saved viewers the 270 minutes it takes to slog through both of them, and would have kept us from having to listen to Goldsman saying things like "This is the Universal logo . this is the Dreamworks logo . this is the Imagine logo." Still, it's good for the screenwriter of an ostensibly true story to be accountable for his deviations from real events, and Goldsman does a fairly complete job of explaining what he was up to. Even so, a nugget that he drops about some digital leaves that were added to trees that were shot on a wintry day at the Princeton campus (the morning after Russell Crowe won the Oscar for Gladiator!) is my favorite anecdote.

Finally, the disc boasts something called Total Axess [sic], which Universal introduced on the DVD for Spy Game, a movie that I found so painful in theaters I couldn't bear to slip a screener copy into my computer. Basically, Total Axess seems to be just another pointer to a goofy set of Web-based "features." For example, you can look at "exclusive" stills from the film in extremely low resolution, or download "exclusive" clips featuring Ron Howard talking about how great Russell Crowe is (in case you felt like you needed a little more of that kind of sycophancy in your life) at a whopping 300kbps, or about a tenth of the bandwidth of a low-quality DVD feature. Um, Universal honchos? The point of DVD is high quality, so your Web-based features should be either highly interactive or very low bandwidth. The AV content should go on the disc. When I tried to access previews of other Universal features, Interactual Player crashed and burned on a Javascript error. Grateful for the reprieve, I popped the disc out of my computer and took another look at Gosford Park.

Gosford Park
B+

"How do you manage to put up with these people?"

Movie Credits:

Directed by Robert Altman

Screenplay by Julian Fellowes

Based on an idea by Robert Altman and Bob Balaban

Cinematography by Andrew Dunn

Edited by Tim Squyres

Starring Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Kelly Macdonald

USA, 2002

Aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Screened at Loews Palisades Center, West Nyack, NY


Star Wars @Deep Focus:


Like A Beautiful Mind, Gosford Park has Academy-pleasing elements in abundance-a beautiful British cast, a stately manor full of intrigue, and a table-turning gimmick by which the film grasps at significance.

The difference between this picture and the run-of-the-mill Oscar bait it suggests can be seen in the opening sequence, which takes place in a sopping downpour. As the actors' credits appear on screen, we watch a car pull up in front of a largish house and see the driver and a servant girl pull a canopy over the front seats and attach it to the windshield. As Altman's camera peers through scraggly tree branches, the lady of the house is brought out beneath another servant's umbrella and helped into the vehicle while the girl and the driver stand in the rain, waiting for her to get settled. As the car finally pulls away, the remaining servant stands beneath the umbrella, watching the lady depart with a grimace on his face perched between bitterness and resignation. The camera tracks forward slowly, and the words appear silently on the screen in the emptiness into which he's staring: GOSFORD PARK.

That's the kind of incisive, wordless moment that characterizes Robert Altman's best work. Without putting too fine a point on it, he sets the tone for a film that will linger in the quarters of servants and register disgust with the lifestyles of the comfortable. ("How do you manage to put up with these people?" asks Hollywood visitor Bob Balaban of his actor friend at one point.) It's a declaration that the old Hollywood master is back on his game.

The upstairs/downstairs yarn that ensues is a mostly delicious embroilment of passions and resentment that ineluctably link the lives of the rich with those who give their lives to them. Everyone gives a terrific performance, particularly the underappreciated Kelly Macdonald (Trainspotting), playing the servant girl from the opening scene, and Helen Mirren, who clearly got the plum role in the first place. (Even the lame accent sported by Ryan Phillipe in early scenes turns out to be a character note.) The pace is slowed, somewhat, when Stephen Fry shows up to investigate a murder-obligating Altman to take a stab at subverting the conventions of the drawing-room mystery. Clearly breaking no new ground and offering not much in the way of unique insight, Gosford Park is nonetheless an elaborately scripted (by Oscar-winner Julian Fellowes, who contributes a commentary), expertly realized and quietly moving drama.

A great shame of mine is that I watched this film during awards season on a letterboxed VHS screener that was sent to me by Universal. In contrast, the DVD is an absolute revelation. Photography that appeared pointlessly murky on tape is revealed here to be deep and richly detailed, yet redolent of the murkiness that afflicts the serving class. Some scenes on the DVD seem to have been encoded with a touch of what videophiles call "edge enhancement," which is an artifact added either during the telecine or MPEG-compression process, and which tends to obscure fine details on high-quality displays. Consumers with smaller screens and/or less discerning eyes probably won't notice any problems with the transfer. Film grain is nicely rendered, and the image is deep and inviting.

Among the supplements are a director's commentary. Robert Altman goes through the motions, but seems no more enthusiastic about deconstructing his work here than he does on DVDs. (His best commentary track, for the Criterion Collection edition of The Player, remains available only on laserdisc.) Production designer Stephen Altman and producer David Levy make unbilled appearances on the same track-would it have been too difficult to have everyone introduce themselves at the beginning of the discussion? I spent the whole freaking movie wondering who that third guy was.

Distinctly more interesting is the commentary by Fellowes on the second track, which explains much of the character motivation that he considered in the context of 1932 British society. "I hope we're not too judgemental," he avers at the end of the film. "There are nice and nasty people above and below." Again, Universal would have done viewers a favor by editing the two tracks, filling in the longish pauses, and putting the kibosh on the mutual admiration voiced between the two Altmans. The rest of the material here is your standard-issue studio promotional output, and while it may impart some interesting information about the working methods of everyone involved, including unsung heroes of period-piece filmmaking like the "cook technical adviser" and the "parlor maid technical adviser," stuff like this tends to put me to sleep. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

DEEP FOCUS: Movie Reviews by Bryant Frazer
http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/
bryant@deep-focus.com