The Film, A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 movie that won four Academy Awards. It is based on the true story of Jon Nash the Nobel Laureate mathematician. The director is Ron Howard and the cast includes Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany and Christopher Plummer. Much of the movie takes place at Princeton University but also at Nash’s home. The time period of the film is about 1950 to 1990s.

The story of the film starts with Nash at Princeton trying to develop his thesis and stumbling upon the beginning of an idea that will revolutionize the wold of mathematics when he and his friends are at a bar. Nash eventually finishes his schooling but visits Princeton again a few years later. There he meets a Department of Defense agent who invites Nash to a top-secret facility where he cracks an enemy code. Nash is given assignments to find hidden messages from soviets in magazines and newspapers. It is only halfway through the movie that it is revealed that Nash suffers from schizophrenia and that his friend, his friend’s niece, and the agent are all parts of his imagination.

I loved this movie; I didn’t see the twist coming the first time I watched. The imaginary people are intricately woven into his life with no hint at being anything but real to Nash and the viewer. I did some research and found that in truth Nash only heard them and didn’t see them and so people have criticized the inaccuracies of the film. But for a film to be more meaningful to the majority of its audience it has to use visuals. I think that even though they made the people visible, it had to be done for people to realized and believe that Nash could see these people as real without seeing them. It is impossible to truly understand what the real Nash had to go through and how he could believe because most people are stuck in the visual aspects of life, but I think by making the characters visible and then revealing the truth helps viewers understand.

This movie and the book I have read most recently, A Question of Power, both have their own ways of showing us "ordinary" people what the hell within the mind is like.  What makes these stories so powerful and thought provoking is not how truthful the stories are to what really happened but how well they convey the feeling of suffering.  These stories bring us into the pain associated with not knowing what the universal reality is and not knowing how to deal with personal realities.