Movie overview
The Movie ‘A beautiful mind’ is a poignant and emotionally charged film that details the life of a luminous intellectual suffering from Schizophrenia. The suffering slowly takes over his mind and we can see from the movie as his life deteriorates apart around him. He decides to abandon his students and distances himself away from his colleagues. He is later taken to hospital and forced to acknowledge his condition and attempt to repair the devastated fragments of his life. John Von Neumann demonstrated that mathematical models could be used in explaining the player’s behavior in simple games. Nash is seen scribbling on his windows some notes. However, we are not certain whether the notes being scribbled are chemical formulae or just some rhyming couplets and not mathematical equations. The movie is about a young mathematician, John Nash who made a lot of contributions to the field of mathematics. By 30, he had done important work in quite a number of fields. Some of them included the game theory, quantum mechanics and the number theory. However, just after he was 30, he is attacked by schizophrenia, which he struggled with for a period of about 3 decades. To his surprise he is later on awarded a Nobel Memorial prize in economic for the contributions he had made in economic science when he was a graduate student. The movie actually revolves around the experiences that this Young Mathematician had as he struggled with schizophrenia. The movie is directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman. It is based on the book by Sylvia Nasar.
Patient (John Nash)
The patient depicted in the movie is John Nash who is a well renowned mathematician and scientist who made lots of contributions in the field of economic and mathematics but later suffers from schizophrenia. He was born on June 13, 1928 and the film mainly revolves around his mathematical genius and the apparent struggle with the paranoid schizophrenia. Nash’s parents gave him the chance to prosper in his academics as they helped him acquire reading materials and even allowed him take some advanced mathematics courses at a local college while he was still in high school. After completing his high school he took up a scholarship and graduated with a Masters degree within three years.
History of his illness
Nash started showing some signs of extreme paranoia in 1959. His wife described him as unpredictable and then started talking about some strange characters putting his life in danger. During this time, Nash believed that any person who put on a red tie was part of a conspiracy that was conspiring against him. He therefore posted several letters to different embassies in Washington DC asserting that they were setting up a government.
Medical history
Later on in 1959 between April and May, he was admitted to the McLean Hospital where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This is a condition whereby a person often becomes paranoid or has fixed beliefs which could be either false or over-imaginative. After being released from hospital, he resigned from MIT and withdrew his pension and travelled to Europe. While in Europe, he tried to denounce his US Citizenship and had quite a rough time while in France. The US government requested for his deportation back to US, a request that was granted by the France government. Nash had nine years of periodic visits to psychiatric hospitals and also got insulin shock therapy in attempt to make him regain his condition. After 1970, he did commit to the hospital again and refused any kind of medication.
The movie is a dramatization that is based on Sylvia Nasar’s book and not a documentary. The director does no focus much on the mathematician Nash but focuses mostly on the ailing Nash. Since it is a movie and the main intention of the movie is to entertain, the director deliberately leaves out some scenes that are not likely to bring much entertainment to the viewers but concentrates on the part of the movie that will be more interesting to the viewers. Nash is also seen from the movie as a person who likes to go out to the bar when he is not in the classroom or in the library. He likes looking at attractive women while in the bar and is not a kind of a person who is ever in his books. Nash’s wife Alicia struggles to rebuild their marriage after several years of divorce.
Mr. Nash was a prime number in the way he interacted or related to his colleagues. He had an antisocial temperament and a predilection for cruel put downs and some dangerous practical jokes. Nash fathered a child with another woman before marrying Alicia. He also formed a number of passionate bonds with other men. He was later detained when he was found imploring for sex in a men’s room. When his condition worsened and he became intolerable, his wife Alicia divorced him. They however remarried in June, 2001.
A beautiful mind starts with a speech from the conjured professor Helinger declaring that since the American Mathematicians had played a crucial role in defeating the Nazi Germany, they must now focus their attention to conquering the Soviet Communism. There was some notion that many of the mathematicians were sympathetic of the communism. The narrative in the film however differs in a number of ways with the real events that took place in Nash’s life. The film has been disparaged for the discrepancies however; the film makers have defended themselves saying that the film was not intended to be a perfect representation.
The casting of the film was also met with lots of challenges. It was very difficult to portray the mental stress and illness on one’s mind. Other challenges included the characters in the film corresponding to the real characters in the life of John Nash. Only very few of the characters in the film corresponded with their real life representations. In the movie, Alicia’s divorce of Nash in 1963 has not been included in the movie. In the movie Nash is shown to join Wheeler Laboratory at MIT. This is fiction as the laboratory does not exist anywhere. In the film, when Nash was receiving his Nobel Prize in 1994, he is heard saying that he takes newer medications while it is clear that Nash refused to take any medications after 1970. This movie is rated PG-13 and parents are strongly advised to guide their children consequently as it has some offensive scenes and placid sexual content.
Work cited List
1. Dana Mackenzie "Beautiful Math" Swarthmore College Bulletin 2002
2. Nasar, Sylvia (1998). A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr.. Simon & Schuster
3. Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, Touchstone 1998
