Film Summary: A Beautiful Mind

Documentaries aren’t as popular compared to horror or comedy films at this point in time, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some astounding classic documentaries. If you are interested in a documentary so misconstrued it borders the line of science fiction, this movie you will interest you. A Beautiful Mind is a very realistic, mysterious, feel good movie with a main character you will connect with.
A Beautiful Mind stars Russel Crowe as Nash, and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Alicia, who’s pregnant with their child when the initial symptoms of his disease first come to light. It shares the narrative of a man whose intelligence contributed immensely to mankind while simultaneously betraying him with unnerving hallucinations. Crowe breathes

life into the character by making sure not to over-hype the role, and builds his personality with small behavioral details. He projects a man surrounded by his own madness, only to unexpectedly regain the capability to operate in the academic world. Nash has been compared to revolutionary historical figures Newton, Mendel and Darwin, yet was simultaneously viewed by some only as a man murmuring to himself in solitude for many years.
Director Ron Howard very clearly exudes a positive core in Nash, which inspired his wife and others to stand by him, to keep hope and, in her words in his darkest hour, "to believe that something extraordinary is possible." Nash begins as a shy, yet confident young man with a West Virginia accent, who gradually turns into a tortured, secretive paranoid who believes he is a spy being trailed by government agents. Crowe has an astounding ability to change his look to fit a role. Although Nash ages 47 years during the film, Crowe continuously plays the part flawlessly.
Young adult Nash, seen at Princeton in the late 1940s, calmly tells a scholarship winner "there is not a single seminal idea on either of your papers." When he loses at a game of Go, he explains: "I had the first move.

My play was perfect. The game is flawed." He is aware of his impact on others ("I don't much like people and they don't much like me") and recalls that his first-grade teacher said he was "born with two helpings of brain and a half-helping of heart." It is Alicia who helps him find his heart. She is a graduate student when they meet, is attracted to his genius, and touched by his loneliness. She accepts his idea of courtship when he informs her, "Ritual requires we proceed with a number of platonic activities before we have sex." To the degree that he can be touched. She touches him, although his reaction is cold and emotionless. He seems as if he is an empty shell on the outside, though his words seem as if he is trapped inside his own

skin.
Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the 1998 biography that inspires Akiva Goldsman's screenplay, begins her book by quoting Wordsworth about "a man forever voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." Nash's disease takes a literal, visual form.

He believes he is being pursued by a federal agent (Ed Harris), and imagines himself in chase scenes that seem to be inspired by 1940s crime movies. He begins to find patterns where no patterns exist. One night he and Alicia stand under the sky and he asks her to name any object, and then connects stars to draw it. Romantic, but it's not so romantic when she discovers his office thickly papered with countless bits torn from newspapers and magazines, connected by frantic lines into imaginary

patterns.
The movie follows his treatment plan by an understanding psychiatrist (Christopher Plummer), and his agonizing courses of insulin shock therapy. Medication helps him improve somewhat--but only, of course, when he takes the medication. Eventually newer drugs are more effective, and he begins a slow and steady re-entry into the academic world at Princeton.
The movie fascinated me about the life of this man, and I was curious to know more information. I discovered he had voluntarily secluded himself for many years. Wandering the campus, talking to no one, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, paging through piles of newspapers and magazines. After purposefully being alone for quite some time, he casually gave an ordinary compliment to a colleague about his daughter. This is seemingly an ordinary interaction, yet this interaction caused the people of the University to decide that Nash was finally able to control his visions in public.
There is a remarkable scene in the movie when a representative for the Nobel committee (Austin Pendleton) comes visiting, and hints that Nash is being "considered" for the prize. Nash observes that people are usually informed they have won, not that they are being considered. He casually stated, "You came here to find out if I am crazy and would screw everything up if I won." His comment was followed by a smile and reassurance from the representative. He won, and accepted his Nobel Prize on stage, giving a heartwarming speech like any other normal award winner.
The movies have a way of pushing mental illness into corners. It is grotesque, sensational, cute, funny, willful, tragic or perverse. Here it is simply a disease, which renders life almost but not quite impossible for Nash and his wife, before he becomes one of the lucky ones to pull out of the downward spiral.
When he won the Nobel, Nash was asked to write about his life, and he was honest enough to say his recovery is "not entirely a matter of joy." He states clearly, "Without my 'madness', Zarathustra (a religious informer whom Nash specialized in teaching) would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten." Unfortunately, Nash and Alicia died in a car crash on May 23, 2015 while coming come from receiving the Abel prize. Without his madness, would Nash have also lived and then been forgotten? Did his ability to puncture the most difficult reaches of mathematical thought somehow come with a price attached? The movie does not know and cannot say. That is for us, as the viewers and individual thinkers, to decide.