Beautiful. A startlingly convincing portrayal of mental illness.

Rating: 10/10 (2 April 2002)

A Beautiful Mind is a difficult movie to review. I always think that the terrible movies are the most fun to review, because there's nothing better than slashing a movie like Scary Movie or Coyote Ugly that is obviously a belligerent mess, but it is the great films that allow for the presentation of some meaning in a review, and A Beautiful Mind presents a unique set of challenges in reviewing a great film. One way to begin to look at this film is to simply try to list the vast number of ways in which the film illuminates different elements of the human condition. There are the obvious ones, such as the problems associated with mental illness, as well as the fact that people who suffer from mental illness can be considered nothing other than victims, but are still all too often frightened and hurt by their treatment, but then there are less obvious ones, such as the fact that people truly are a product of their environment, and in the case of John Nash, that very environment lashes out at him when it is not processed correctly in his head.
Whatever the extent to which these things are true, Nash's delusions are clearly a result of the stress involved in his education (as well as the fact that, as they say, genius is often associated with madness), the stress involved with the type of work that his specialty leads to, and perhaps most importantly, Nash's perception of the government as cryptic and potentially dangerous, as well as his perception of the Russians as dangerous people who are constantly involved in some sort of conspiracy. Nash becomes a victim of that a government in his own mind as well as in the real world, although in the real world they are seeking to help him rather than to force him to perform work that he doesn't believe in.
(spoilers) The first 45 minutes to an hour of A Beautiful Mind, admittedly, are hardly Oscar material, either the acting or directing or anything else, but once you realize that Nash's entire occupation with the government as well as his roommate were all in his head, then you go back and analyze the beginning of the film more closely with that knowledge. This is very much the same kind of plot twist that we saw in The Sixth Sense a couple years ago, except that it is much more applicable to real life in this case. The Sixth Sense was the portrayal of a sort of afterlife, the existence of which is very much debatable, while A Beautiful Mind is the portrayal of a man with schizophrenia, which is a very real and very incurable disease. The film is, in fact, virtually a textbook of schizophrenic symptoms and the workings of schizophrenia.
One of my favorite things about In Dreams, a film that I truly enjoyed and I will stand by my assertion that it is a quality film, was the way that it presented the mental illness of Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.), the rather unusual villain presented in that film. In fact, I think I said something in my review of In Dreams about how you should watch the movie if you want to know what it's like to be insane, but A Beautiful Mind is a much more mature, realistic, and convincing presentation of a more specific and more debilitating mental disease than whatever it was exactly that Vivian suffered from in In Dreams. This is not a psychological thriller, but an intensely humanitarian drama that powerfully delivers the extraordinary story of John Nash's life.
There is just the right amount of humor in just the right places, Ron Howard's brilliant direction takes us through the unimaginable maze of schizophrenia, and you leave the film feeling that you have not only been entertained for two and a half hours, but that you have learned something important about one of the most devastating mental illnesses currently acknowledged and studied. There are thousands of things that you simply can't learn from reading a book, and the true nature of mental illnesses is obviously one of them. While I can't say whether or not A Beautiful Mind accurately depicted schizophrenia (because I don't suffer from it, nor does anyone I know), I can say that it is an exceptional portrayal of the thing that victims of schizophrenia experience. Through his vast contributions to humanity despite being plagued by terrifying schizophrenic delusions, John Nash has entered the realm of mentally ill people who have truly done great things in spite of their illnesses, such as Kay Redfield Jamison and Sylvia Plath, both of whom have written startlingly enlightening books that illuminate their respective disorders. I've always thought that it would just be great to be as recognized and respected as Nash has become, with the condition that I would not have to suffer through all of the hardships that he went through. John Nash has more than earned his fame, both because of his illness and because of his accomplishments (although potentially not because of either of them alone), and A Beautiful Mind is a fantastic film that brings it all to the screen for the public to see and to learn and benefit from.