A Beautiful Mind

Lead actors: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly

Director: Ron Howard

I watched this movie on TV, without even a slightest idea about its story. And I’m glad I did ‘coz otherwise I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did.

----The rest of the content of the blog post has spoilers and I recommend you not to read further if you don’t have an idea about the story and intend to watch the movie----

The movie begins with John Nash (Russell Crowe) arriving as a graduate student at the Princeton University. Though somewhat nerdy, he finds a best friend in his roommate Charles Herman (Paul Bettany). After graduation he is offered a job at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He later falls in love with and marries one of his students Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly).

One fine day, he is approached by a Pentagon agent (Ed Harris) to decipher some complex secret codes. Nash breaks the code mentally with ease and is soon absorbed by the Pentagon to act as their secret agent and decipher codes for them. He even receives a chip an implant in his arm from the Pentagon.

All’s going well until one day when Russian agents track down Nash and chase him, and even fire at him. Panic-stricken, Nash rushes home and asks his wife to leave the place and go away from the danger.

The next day as he is delivering a lecture at the Harvard University, a bunch of people sedate him and forcefully take him to a psychiatric facility. Nash cries out that the doctor is a fake and is in fact a Russian agent. The doctor speaks to Alicia and says that Nash is schizophrenic and when she finds it hard to believe, even says, “John thinks I'm a Russian spy. Is that what you think?” (I was like, ‘Of course, you ARE a Russian spy! Now leave that poor brilliant professor alone!’)

Now cut to another scene where Nash is tearing off the skin from his arm and crying, “The implant's gone. I can't find it. It's gone”. (Now it hits me hard- that John Nash is in fact schizophrenic and the Pentagon stuff was his hallucination. At this point of time, the film had me so confused, I could no longer make out what was real and what was a part of Nash’s hallucination in the movie!). As it turns out, even Nash’s best friend at Princeton, Charles, never existed!

The rest of the story traces how Nash deals with schizophrenia and works his way to achieving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

The movie is based on the life of John Forbes Nash whose breakthroughs in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations are in use in many fields even today. It is said though that the story deviates a lot from the actual facts in John Nash’s life.

A Beautiful Mind explores the beauty, complexity as well as the vulnerability of the human mind. It’s an unparalleled master-piece and is my all-time favorite.

Verdict: A must-watch.

My Rating: 4.5/5