Beautiful Mind is Right-On about Psychosis

Rating: 10/10 (15 January 2005)

A Beautiful Delusion
There is no point in being nuts if you can't have fun. (Mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind)
A Beautiful Mind is a biographical film starring Russell Crowe as mathematician John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia long enough to become familiar enough with his demons to finally recognize them as such. That is a victory worth celebrating, and the movie does so, eloquently.
Some critics of A Beautiful Mind compared it to Sylvia Nasar's 450-page biography of the same title, and said it did not faithfully portray the complexity of either Nash's life or his disease. That's asking a lot of a two hour movie.
No, Nash did not have the visual hallucinations portrayed in the movie. And yes, the movie came nowhere near Nash's belief that he was receiving messages from outer-space aliens, calling him to found a world government. But the film did make Nash's delusions credible to the viewer.
"The prodigal roommate appears" says Charles, arriving in Nash's grad-student life with a hangover. Charles is played admirably by Paul Bettany (later the ship's surgeon in Master and Commander). And, unless you are symptom-hunting from the get-go, Charles will be as real to you as he is to Nash. Only later will you see him as the flip-side of Nash's asocial personality, created by his imagination out of a very human need for companionship and love.
And that is the way delusions really are. From long and bitter experience I know: Psychosis sneaks up on you hypnotically, like a blacksnake moving by imperceptible increments toward the creature it suddenly devours.
Like Charles, and like the cartoon G-man Parcher (played by Ed Harris) who replaces him, delusions offer excitement. As the recovering Nash says wryly, "There is no point in being nuts when you can't have fun." And they're charming. They know how much more important you are than others realize, how central in significance.
As a film, Beautiful Mind merited four Acadamy Awards. But for those of us who have suffered from mental illness its finest accomplishment is that it did not romanticize mental illness, as many movies do, nor attribute the disease to that movie clichÃ©, the Horrible Repressed Trauma. Rather, it revealed what psychosis is like from the inside, and that also is a victory worth celebrating.
Tom McClellan +++