Film Analysis Of The Mind's A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind falls under the category of a narrative film as it is a biopic. It is based off the life of John Forbes Nash Jr. (John Nash in the film) and follows his life from graduate school to old age. The story duration is 47 years (Nash arrives at Princeton in 1947 and receives the Nobel prize in1994) while the plot duration is select years from these years of his life. There is repetition in the film in the form of Nash’s code-breaking. We often are presented with him “seeing” patterns and the audience being shown parts that are accentuated by light. A familiar image is shown when he goes to the pentagon and again later when he thinks he is decoding secret messages in articles for Parcher. The order and scope of the movie is chronicling
I do not recall having seen him in a movie before and had so had no expectations about the character or actor. However, I found his behavior very off-putting from the beginning. The first time I watched A Beautiful Mind I had not looked up anything about the movie and knew only that the film was about a mathematician. Now, I know in many books mathematicians are portrayed as distant and weird, but as I went to an academy focused on math, I know that many of them are not truly like this. As the movie went on though, it became more apparent that the actor was not portraying a simple mathematician but instead, a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions. My favorite visual was the use of light refraction. Nash uses it as a segue to talk to his fellow students at the Princeton luncheon, as well as start a conversation with Alicia and apologize when he is late to a dinner. Light is used “to create mood, reveal character, and convey meaning” (Barsam and Monahan, 2016) and one of our first shots of Nash is with him playing with light through a cup. Patterns form a fundamental part of A Beautiful Mind particularly. Throughout the movie there are many times Nash “sees” a pattern and the pattern is accentuated with lights (such as in the scene with Neilson’s tie at the luncheon, or with the various code-breakings through the