SPOILER - Deciphering the secret codes of reality

Rating: Null/10 (10 July 2004)

**CONTAINS SPOILER**
"A Beautiful Mind" is based on a true story about John Nash, a genius mathematician who is intellectually brilliant, but socially challenged. The movie begins with Nash's entrance into Princeton, and spans most of his remaining life. Nash's complicated relationships are both uncommon and heart-warming. At the same time, Nash's decoding assignments for the government during the war and his incredible challenges thereafter are thrilling and full of unexpected twists.
Some of the unexpected twists support the movie's theme that distinguishing between fantasy and reality can sometimes be difficult. For most of the movie, director Ron Howard shows the action through the eyes of John Nash, superbly portrayed by Russell Crowe. The mystery and double-life that Nash must lead due to his top-secret government work with his agency-associate Parcher (Ed Harris) help further the reality-distorting theme. Nash's wife, Alicia, portrayed by Jennifer Connelly in an academy-award-winning performance, has to sort through the top-secret information to figure out what is real ans what isn't.
Director Howard uses low-key lighting to emphasize Nash's point of view regarding his government-conspiracy theory. In a mob-like car chase down dark alleys with only the streetlights and car lights shining, Howard builds the suspense and pulls the audience into Nash's paranoia. Another technique that Howard uses to demonstrate Nash's point of view is animation. Several times, animation that has been layered on top of live action brings alpha and numeric characters to life as Nash analyzes lines of seemingly nonsensical data for a code.
Just as deciphering the secret codes seems insurmountable for John Nash's observers, distinguishing between what is imagined and what is tangible can be extraordinarily difficult for some people as well. To demonstrate this, Ron Howard uses some of the same story-telling strategies that director M. Night Shyamalan uses in "The Sixth Sense." Shyamalan shows Bruce Willis' character, a depressed psychologist, through the extraordinary point of view of a gifted young spirit-seer, Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment. By convincing the audience that Willis is portraying a normal therapist in Sear's daily life, there is a definite confusion between what is real and what isn't. Similarly, without seeing and hearing Nash's daily interactions with his personal phantoms, creating an audience appreciation for the obstacles that John Nash overcomes would have been impossible. Indeed, at the end of this film, Howard has made it clear that sorting out reality from fantasy can be difficult.