Much more human than otherwise.

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2002)

As a psychiatrist who has spent thousands of hours talking with mentally ill people, I was eager to see "A Beautiful Mind". I wanted to see if this would be the very first movie ever to portray people with schizophrenic illness in a sympathetic light, to avoid the usual stereotypes such as "really scary psychotic killer" or "impossibly weird bag person".
Alas, we will have to wait
As portrayed in "A Beautiful Mind", John Nash is one scary dude. From the scene where he almost lets his infant son drown because he is convinced that his delusional friend Charles is watching the infant while Nash is elsewhere, to the one in which he very nearly assaults his wife in response to a voice telling him she is out to get him, the film portrays Nash as a man who at any moment can cross over the line to where his delusional ideas create real tragedies. Don't turn your back on this guy!
But putting aside my own agenda, I would have to say that the movie has unusual strengths, thanks to masterful performances by Russell Crowe as John Nash, and by Jennifer Connelly as his wife Alicia.
Crowe gives a subtle and beautiful performance, and he very nearly pulls it off. Certainly he is good enough in the role that I never once thought "gladiator". His John Nash characterization has many sides - the painfully uncomfortable boy-man at Princeton, the sardonic humorist, the deservedly arrogant professional mathematician, the scared, pitiful recipient of the full onslaught of psychotically imagined auditory hallucinations - and these characterizations almost work. But the young Nash, although a standout eccentric in his early graduate studies, is not really weird enough to portray the estrangement that must have been his lot as, in the midst of intense creative efforts, he was already struggling with a delusional system he could not always distinguish from reality. And even in the throes of his worst psychotic nightmares, when he lashes out at the doctor who comes to intervene on his behalf, he is too contained. But what Crowe does get right in the performance is a lot. Somehow he has managed to learn the peculiar and highly idiosyncratic posture and gait that many people with schizophrenia display and which is unmistakable to the trained eye. Particularly nice, I thought, was how Crowe's Nash could recover from lethal social gaffes with quick wit and charm, as for example during his visit back at Princeton where he is asking the new department chairman (and his old nemesis from graduate school) if he might return to the campus to teach. In the midst of their conversation, Nash is convulsed by his delusion, and lashes out at an imagined presence. He then turns to the startled chairman and asks, "Is there any way that you could forget what I just did?"
As Alicia, Jennifer Connelly gives a moving performance as Nash's once and future wife. Falling in love with a man who can find everything in the starry heavens, and who knows the universe is infinite, she is quickly disillusioned as he succumbs to an illness which was even more of a curse in 1954 than it is today. She withstands seeing her husband subjected to dozens of gruesome insulin shock "treatments" and later, when he is home from the hospital, has to contend with his withdrawal, lack of affection, and creative stupor, partially side effects of the drug Thorazine, which was the only useful treatment way back then. When Nash recognizes the drug's deleterious effects on himself and stops the medication, he is quickly thrust back into the terror. Nevertheless, in the movie at least, she stands by her man. She comforts him when she can, and confronts him when she must, and gradually he begins to come out of the illness. Some may feel that the relationship of John and Alicia was the smaltziest part of this movie, the least isomorphic mapping from any of John Nash's real biography to the world of the silver screen. But to me it was the most real, because I have seen how important such a relationship is to a person struggling to emerge from mental illness. Next to the medication, it counts for everything.
I saw this movie with the woman who is my boss at the mental health center where I work. We spent a long time afterwards talking about it. She said something I thought was particularly true. She said, "What Ron Howard has done is to give us a movie not about a "schizophrenic", as if the term "schizophrenic" defined the person, but about a person who happens to have the illness schizophrenia."
I for one hope that other artists will build on this work. Maybe people are ready to understand that, in the words of the iconoclastic hero of American psychiatry Harry Stack Sullivan, "People with schizophrenia are much more human than otherwise."