NEVER mind the Golden Globes and the Bafta glory, A Beautiful Mind is the kind of Hollywood film that will be remembered less fondly with each passing year.

What it has is two Tinseltown award favourites: a man in the throes of mental illness and an actor, in this case New Zealander of the moment Russell Crowe, ageing from puppy-fat student to white-haired old boy. Instant success guaranteed, but not longevity, and there's too much truth-cutting too in this dishonest, cynical work.

A Beautiful Mind is based on the memoirs of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, Princeton tutor and flawed genius John Forbes Nash Jr, but only loosely with the airbrushing sanitising Nash while pumping up the paranoid schizophrenia into an audience-tricking device that director Ron Howard asks reviewers not to give away.

Nash's story is picked up in 1947 as this tongue-tied, socially awkward outsider from West Virginia arrives at Princeton, forms a friendship with dry-witted room-mate Charles (Paul Bettany) but is mocked by his fellow maths students... until he comes up with his mathematical breakthrough that will bring him his Nobel Prize so many years later - and bring them the girls.

He marries a physics student (Jennifer Connelly), indulges in some human biology but as he becomes embroiled in a world of Cold War top secrecy, paranoia takes over, or is it schizophrenia, as he tries to make sense of coded messages sent to him, he believes by aliens, on newspaper front pages.

Russell Crowe deserves plaudits for conveying both the nerdy brilliance of Nash's mathematical mind and the ravages of schizophrenia without recourse to the usual nervous mannerisms, and his Nash always retains a dignity and frazzled intelligence. That dignity, alas, is absent from Ron Howard's direction of this manipulative movie, which is too simplistic and flashy in its presentation of schizophrenia, too smooth-edged in its depiction of Nash and ultimately too much of a lie. For once, Howard holds back on the sentimentality, as does Crowe, until the director can't resist the schmaltzy finale that does A Beautiful Mind no favours, except when it comes to securing Oscars.

At least mathematics is made to look far more exciting and racy than any O-level lesson I can recall but A Beautiful Mind has too many minuses to add up to a great piece of film art.

Updated: 09:11 Friday, March 01, 2002