John Nash begins graduate study in mathematics at Princeton during the dawn of the Cold War. He and his classmates are told that World War II was won by the mathematicians whose talents helped break enemy codes and beat the Axis to the A-bomb. Had Nash himself worked among the likes of Oppenheimer and Einstein, one gets the impression he would've disdained even them as inferior peers, for his inflated sense of self greatly outweighs his ability to play with others. And even though A Beautiful Mind's script puts self-analytical lines in his mouth such as "I have a chip on both shoulders" and claiming he's got "two helpings of brain but only half a helping of heart," the film's two-plus hours mean to show us just how little he truly knows himself.

Grad school goes badly for Nash from the start, not least because he refuses to attend class and associate with the "lesser mortals" that do. "I cannot waste time on classes and books," he explains, "classes…destroy the potential for original creativity." Superiority complexes, of course, serve to mask one's actual insecurities, and by removing himself from the company of most of humanity helps conceal just how poorly socialized Nash really is. Losing an impromptu game of Go to another student, Nash's reaction resembles that of someone a third his age: he flees. What we've got is a case of arrested development - hardly, it seems, a heroic figure worthy of the big-screen treatment.

It turns out Nash is as brilliant as he is unsociable, though, and he quickly comes up with some truly original ideas that more than justify his place in academe. Mind thus presents us with the romantic figure of the maverick genius, who whips up theories on "governing dynamics" that contradict Adam Smith's long-dominant economic models, who lands himself a position at M.I.T.'s Wheeler Defense Labs, who himself helps the Department of Defense crack coded radio transmissions from Moscow.

It doesn't hurt that Nash is portrayed by Russell Crowe, who is not only a genuinely talented actor but also has the body of, well, a gladiator. Though he feels extremely put upon having to teach a class during his tenure at M.I.T., one of his students turns out to be Jennifer Connelly, whose Alicia Larde is both a hottie and no intellectual slouch. Maladroit doesn't even come close to describing Nash's command of the English language in social situations, but Connelly still asks him out to dinner, and who can blame her? Underneath all those nervous tics is Russell Crowe, for heaven's sake - has a math professor ever had arms like those? - and Connelly wins him over rattling off lines like "God must be a painter - that must be why we have so many colors." (I will try that next time at the bar.) It's a tacit rule that Hollywood movies must either include a love interest or a car chase (Mind has both!), so we'll cut director Ron Howard and scriptwriter Akiva Goldsman some slack as the film lays the groundwork for its actual tale, which will pull the rug up from under all this romance.

A Beautiful Mind's already been out for over a year, so if any of these plot twists are news to you, it's your own fault if you read on. I never saw it during its theatrical run either, for though marketed as a serious endeavor, it never felt like an urgent entry in the film canon; its subsequently winning the Oscar® for Best Picture came as a massive curveball when the first Lord of the Rings installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, seemed so accomplished and epic that I figured Mind could hardly compete. Once Nash is recruited by the Pentagon (in the form of Ed Harris) to decipher coded Fifth Column messages embedded in popular magazines, he marries Connelly, and Soviet agents start to encroach on his sense of security, it's still hard to believe how such a conventional biographical thriller could take the top prize. Let's forget how corny the "computers" look in the subterranean DoD base where Nash is given his mission, or how ludicrous it sounds that Life magazine was colluding with the USSR in the fifties. I didn't have the highest expectations for the film to begin with.

"Don't you think your fear is a small price to pay?" counsels a jingoistic Harris as Crowe's nerves start to crack under his growing paranoia. Ed's dressed all in black, of course, as are the shadowy figures that seem to be tailing Nash everywhere, including at the mathematics conference where he is detained and sent to a psychiatric ward. Christopher Plummer, looking thoroughly insidious, informs Alicia that most of Nash's "classified" work for the government was all made up in his head (exactly what the bad guy would say!), as were several significant characters we'd come to know in the film so far. Turns out Howard's been going back and forth between an omniscient narrator and the world as Nash sees it, and now our job is to figure out which was which. Is Nash a victim of the Cold War, of his congenital mental deterioration, or both? Is his diagnosis of schizophrenia legit, or is he being silenced by the powers that be? Is the government to blame for his burgeoning affliction? Or was Nash simply not cut out for this kind of work? Finally the film gets interesting as we apply to bear all the skills we were taught from watching The Sixth Sense. Nash sees fake people, fake spies, and fake friends; all the same, for most of A Beautiful Mind we're still inclined to suspect there's a big government cover-up going on. Such is the strength of Howard's storytelling, that for a good while we end up as paranoid as Nash.

Connelly now gets to play the steadfast and silently suffering wife and mother, acting as sole breadwinner while her husband sits medicated at home, finally released from the institution after some toe-curling insulin shock treatments. Neither seeing imaginary people nor capable of harnessing his mathematical faculties thanks to a steady stream of pills, the man Alicia fell in love with has been essentially erased, and Connelly earns her own Oscar® when sexual frustration (Nash can't do that either) tears away at her. This is where Mind finally settles into its true raison d'être, chronicling one man's struggle with mental illness. This is the fifties, remember, when treatments were far from sophisticated and societal shame over such an affliction was intense. Finally eschewing the pills that reduced this former genius to a perfectly average nonentity, Nash negotiates his way toward being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and Crowe's characterization finally starts to resemble less of an eccentric Hollywood hunk and more of a legitimately impaired social outcast, bad haircut and all . Here's where we're ambushed by the moral of the story: remember how Nash said he was all head, and not enough heart? Connelly suggests perhaps relying on his formidable intellect in this situation finally isn't enough - this problem is solved by the heart. And, uh, by maybe getting out of the house once in a while.

So, to review: A Beautiful Mind is not a tale of intellectual chutzpah. It is not a tale of Cold War counter-espionage. It's ultimately an illustration of one man's experience with a schizophrenic disorder, with a love story thrown in the mix. That's it. Interesting, yes; moving, yes; but material for the Best Film of the year? Clearly it's a matter of taste. I'm inclined to agree with whoever first suggested that Mind's Oscar® coup was because the current voting membership of the Academy reflects the demo-graphics of American society all too well, i.e. a preponderance of aging Baby Boomers who would find the heart-warming Mind much more appealing than such a dark and fantastical production as The Fellowship of the Ring, despite the latter's obvious technical superiority and literary bravura. It's As Good As It Gets versus Titanic again, and this time the movie about the crazy guy comes out on top. The film finally cuts to Nash receiving his Nobel prize in 1994, and he says to Connelly (made up to look old but looking instead like a beat-up Juliette Lewis), "You are the reason I am." The crowd goes wild, but it's not clear if the Swedes had any idea what he was talking about. (Nor do Nobel recipients give acceptance speeches, but what the hey.) But does it matter? Such an encomium isn't all that different from what we hear at the Oscars® - talk about keeping your eye on the prize.