A Beautiful Mind
A Beautiful Mind is a film based on a true story starring Russel Crowe that portrays the life of a lonely math genius named John Nash who is suffering from schizophrenia and is able to work through his illness to "matter" in the world (as the character described it). This film is essentially a story on how a person is able to overcome a debilitating mental illness to attain a true sense of accomplishment and some would say even greatness.
During the first part of the film, neither the audience nor the character John Nash know that his best friend, his friend's young niece and a mysterious Department of Defence agent are hallucinations. The agent encourages Nash to look for patterns in magazines and newspapers ostensibly to thwart a Soviet plot. From this point, Nash begins to have increasingly paranoid delutions that leads him to act eractically. Spurred by this erractic behavior one of his coworkers follows him durring one of John's late night "drops" of what Nash believed where top secrete Soviet codes that he cracked (that Nash believed were embedded in several periodicals). His coworker sees Nash drop off one of the documents into a drop box at a long empty building. Nash is then confronted with the fact of his schizophenia after being forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric facility. This internment fed into his growing paranoia by convincing him that the Soviets were trying to extract information from him. His wife is able to show him the unopened "top secrete" documents to him in order to convince him that he was hallucinating the whole thing.
Nash is released under orders of taking anti-psychotic drugs which have terrible side-effects on his personality, relationship with his wife and most dramatically, on his genius intellect. A relapse of his parnoid hallucinations is triggered after he stops taking his medications. Not knowing this, his wife allows Nash to give their infant son a bath. The next scene was rather tense as his wife finds out that her husband has relapsed -- she is able to take her sone out of the filling bath water just before it covered his face. Nash said that his friend was watching the child; there was nobody else there. All three of John's apparitions then confront him and the two adults urge him to kill his wife. Nash then realizes the people aren't "real" when he recalls that the little girl never grows older. John then becomes totally convinced that the DOD agent, his best friend, and his best friends still young niece were hallucinations.
Not wanting to suffer from the side effects of the anti-psychotic drugs and not wanting to be haunted by apparations, Nash and his wife decide to try to live with and fight Nash's schizophrenia by having John try to always ignore his hallucinations (not feed "his demons"). The rest of the movie depicts Nash growing older while working on his studies in the library of Princeton University. He is still has haullucinations and periodically has to check if new peole he meets are real, but has grown the ability to live with and largely ignore them. Eventually, Nash begins to teach at the university and is honored by his fellow professors for his lifetime achievement. Shortly after this John is awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his revolutionary work on ecomomic theory.
This film got 4 Oscars in 2002 for:
- WRITING (ADAPTED): Written by Akiva Goldsman
- BEST PICTURE: Brian Grazer and Ron Howard
- DIRECTING: Ron Howard
- ACTRESS -- SUPPORTING: Jennifer Connelly