The scene in "A Beautiful Mind" that haunts me most is not the shock therapy delivered to mathematician John Nash, not his infant son left to drown in the bathtub, not the implantation of a radioactive ID number in Nash's arm. None of these. What I keep wondering about is how Alicia, a young math student at Princeton in the1950s, had the savvy to wear a strapless black evening dress on her very first date, which turns out to be a black-tie Princeton do.

If there were an Oscar for most valiant performance under hostile conditions, then Jennifer Connelly, who plays Alicia -- and who, incidentally, looks great in the strapless black -- would surely win. Ms. Connelly bares up under awkward editing and awful dialog, as when she, now Mrs. Nash, tells him and us that love and faith will cure him of his schizophrenia. In the New Testament, perhaps; in Hollywood, by all means. All that's missing is a new-age crystal.

Dodging a story about ordinary humans, director Ron Howard has chosen to chronicle genius, but the product is the same old inflated confection: a romantic night sky in New Jersey that holds more stars than any Arizona desert; a ghastly Nobel prize award ceremony; and worst of all, the progress to that prize based on one academic paper, scribbling math formulas on window panes, and a lot of frenzied magazine clipping. The pudding is bloated and sweetened by yet another "uplifting", swollen music track. So predictable and so unbelievable.