A Beautiful Mind. Dir. Ron Howard.Perf. Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Ed
Harris. Universal Pictures, 2001.
A Beautiful Mind is a true story about the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. Russell Crowe, playing an arrogant Professor Nash, makes a remarkable advancement in the foundations of “Game Theory,” which carries him to the brink of international acclaim. Nash struggles to maintain his hold on sanity, and his wife suspects he is suffering from schizophrenia. Nash develops a sense of paranoia, while decoding encrypted non-existent Soviet spy messages from comic books and newspaper advertisements. His illness threatens to tear apart his marriage, career, and life. In the end, he is able to gain some control over his mental state, and wins a Nobel Prize.
In this movie, Nash struggles with himself given the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. It makes him unsure of whom he is and causes his life to slowly fall apart. A Beautiful Mind combines Nash’s imagination and the world of reality illustrating one man’s struggle against great odds. His schizophrenia causes him to lose sense of himself and threatens his marriage and career, but Nash eventually finds a way to grasp his illness and something good comes from it.