Budgeted at $60 million with a global box office take somewhere in the several hundreds of millions of dollars, Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind was a commercial hit and the cause celebre of American movies in 2001. Acting up to its public expectation as the most anticipated dramatic picture of the year, and released at the apex of the awards season just before Christmas, it was equally the most suited film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. This was especially true in light of a preposterously uplifting ad campaign even though the film is little more than well-produced and inconsequential pap.

Simply put, A Beautiful Mind concerns John Nash, a brilliant young mathematician, who is diagnosed as a paranoid-schizophrenic but eventually wins a Nobel Prize after decades of struggling with his disease. Various moments from his early years spent striving for success and the painful period of coming to grips with his illness form the backbone of the picture. So too do the personalities of family, friends and doctors that inform his overall story until finally receiving his place among the stars of his discipline as "a beautiful mind."

Based on the provocative biography of the same name by Sylvia Nasar, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman adapted Nash's story by eschewing the loose ends of the historical man as researched and detailed by Nasar. Concentrating on his spectacular arrogance, eccentricity and brilliance in the field of mathematics, Goldsman's Nash turns the man into a romantic figure slighted by personal crisis. His very greatness stems both from his travails and from his will to overcome them, although the density of his real-life person is slighted in favor of idealizing a transformative love through the bliss of a loyal marriage.

Nash's long-suffering wife, Alicia, becomes the lynch pin of his effort to overcome, to evolve, even to solve the "problem" of his mental illness, and it's what consumes the movie's self-consciously serious plot. Nowhere are the possibilities of Nash's pansexual interests addressed, at least during more experimental periods during his youth, nor his much-vaunted anti-Semitism, odd connection to the people and physical place of Princeton University and the everyday strain of his mental illness on his long marriage. Instead these things are pushed aside to develop spectacular moments in Nash's disease as an old cinematic custom and the film's one wholly successful breakthrough in representing mental illness on screen.

Because true experiences of a now aged real-life figure would necessarily complicate the triumph over adversity Hollywood films traditionally depend on means the film's fictional overlay of a morally righteous hero rings off-key. Dulling a variety of Nash's struggles for a made-up heroic persona deflates the authority of Howard's biopic on its way to being a clinic featuring Crowe et all. Our ability to judge the merits of the finished film is thus reduced by its surface sheen built on a richness of production value, an everywhere clear-minded moral certitude and the overall sense of John Nash being an unimpeachable hero worthy of our tears, praise and support.

Stated simply, A Beautiful Mind showcases terrific filmmaking skill accompanied with by-the-numbers emotional cues that erase its underlying story in the face of overwhelming sentimentality. It's the culmination of style and two-dimensional impressions over substance, complexity and resonance. And, more importantly, it was movie-of-the-year with wide public regard and commercial support to stamp the film with the air of genius that I honestly believe will falter over the course of years and increasing retrospection.

Headlined by Crowe, the come-from-nowhere Jennifer Connelly as Alicia and a supporting cast including Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer and Adam Goldberg, these dynamos provide the material with incredible sensitivity and a certain measure of brilliance. What they can't provide, and what the film as a whole fails to develop, however, is the everyday destructiveness of mental illness even in the lives of our erstwhile hero Nash who seemingly learn to control their troubles and live relatively normal lives.

With these remarks I don't mean Howard's movie forgets to deal with the painful delusions and skewed realities of mental illness. Instead it's important to remember that while the film shows trying times like when Alicia institutionalizes her husband for fear of her life and that of their child, there is a more common cost associated with the loss of mental stability. There is the loss of a steady income, the fear of public recognition, the absence of any career, let alone of its advancement, the estrangement from a communal embrace and filial consequences of mental illness passing from parent to child, all of which are true aspects of Nash's life story. Were it not for the golden years success of his Nobel Prize and accompanying million-dollar purse, it's hard to know what we would make of his life save for his singular genius as a young man that was tragically limited by mental defect.

In the film's presumed applicability to other people and its standing as a proof of life and purpose even after diagnosis with debilitations like schizophrenia, A Beautiful Mind is a somewhat misguided movie making its appeal to all of us to better our lives. Moreover, the very facts of Nash's experience, and of his verifiable brilliance, are not very similar to most people with mental illness. Nor is the documented correlation between specific intelligences and troubles of the mind to be downplayed since it's true that genius is often upset by the frailty of an unstable brain. It's just that Nash's trajectory from infante terrible to shining star through a decades-long slump of paranoid schizophrenia and final reification as a conquering hero is not an applicable model to the legions of people everyday trying to overcome various lesser and greater mental disabilities.

For instance, Nash's notoriety lay in the development of game theory. Yet this theory, beyond fulfilling the requirements of his doctoral program in the 1940s, found its purpose when applied to various industries, but not by him, especially to the field of macroeconomics. In this way his game theory started a revolution of sorts that has had lasting impact on the way markets are run in much in the same way as how Keynesian ideas changed the face of investing, finance, dollars and cents earlier in the twentieth century.

Not to simply state the obvious, but Nash is a singular person unlike most of the rest of us. His story is not universal precisely because of his unique abilities thus Howard and his producer Brian Grazer saw fit to use Goldsman's story because it more prominently emphasized the romance of John and Alicia Nash. It follows that love and romance are more translatable to a wider audience than highly difficult and complex numerical abstractions and theories.

One result of such an informed change in narrative focus means A Beautiful Mind is observant of its place in a busy marketplace. Another is the inexplicable elevation of Connelly as the "it" girl of serious American movies, and this despite her relatively steady career in small movies, teen sex comedies among them.

During the film's pre-production phase, and perhaps before the involvement of Howard and Grazer's Imagine Entertainment (see Parenthood, Apollo 13 and Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas), Robert Redford was once considered as director for the project. Eschewing the title as just another responsibility among many, the lead role of Nash was also offered to Tom Cruise who turned it down much to the happy luck of Crowe's rapidly rising star.

Nominated for the Academy's Best Picture Oscar against the enjoyable, though ultimately slight, Gosford Park, the interesting but over-rated In the Bedroom, Baz Luhrmann's celebrated underdog Moulin Rouge and the out-and-out mind-blowingly brilliant screen spectacle of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, A Beautiful Mind managed to catapult of its competitors for reasons that history will show to be false judgments. Namely, the wholesale celebration of a human-interest story about a person (usually a man) who overcomes mental/physical/emotional scars (a la Rain Man and Forrest Gump) to triumph in seemingly heart-warming circumstances beyond the scope of foreseeable ambition. That these scarred people become productive citizens is a testament to will, chance and, more often than not, the devotion of at least one good person (usually a woman). That they then become icons of American cinema is a testament not to the human condition or the will to achieve but to the shrewdness of Hollywood in its organization of screen entertainments on the basis of banal stories lifted from maudlin circumstances by glamorous stars.

For me it's an extraordinary historical oversight that the non-nominated Memento and The Fellowship of the Ring weren't frontrunners for the Oscars race of 2001. Howard's biopic may be just what the Academy's voters ordered, what with its rather striking representation of schizophrenic delusions made manifest in personal, human form, but the point of naming a "best of" award is to find the single most brilliant work within a given method of expression.

A Beautiful Mind, while a magnificently produced, acted and executed film with one extremely original and surprising narrative twist simply isn't the most brilliant work of its moment. That honor belongs to Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth trilogy with all its fantasy, joy and easily interpreted apocalyptic anxiety.