A Beautiful Mind was definitely and interesting movie, I had my doubts about it. The movie was about John Nash; he was a genius mathematician who suffers from schizophrenia. The movie mainly shows the trial and tribulations of living with a great mind but also an ill one.
While at Princeton Nash meets his roommate Charles and they soon become best friends. We later find out that Charles is only a result of John’s schizophrenia. During his time at Princeton John hardly attended his classes but was required to write a thesis paper. He becomes totally fixated on trying to come up with a truly original idea for his paper. At times he is so consumed with trying to be brilliant he struggles and hurts himself. John later becomes a teacher at MIT where he meets and falls in love with a student, Alicia. The two eventually marry and have a son together.
At this time John now has a total of three imaginary friends including Department of Defense agent, William Parcher. In his mind he works for Parcher as a spy and deciphers codes. He becomes fixated and his behavior becomes erratic, as he grows paranoid for his life. Witnessing her husband’s behavior Alicia calls a psychiatric hospital to take John.
After many treatments John is able to live at home on medication. Alicia grows frustrated with most of the load at home working, the baby and John. He secretly stops taking his medication in hopes that it will help his home life. This only brings back the hallucinations and his "spy work" endangering his son and Alicia. As she tries to leave he realizes that he suffers from schizophrenia.
Later on we see that John has returned to teaching and still sees his imaginary friends but ignores them. John was honored for his achievement in mathematics, and goes on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The films representation of Genius is clear; John was one of the brightest students of his time and a great Mathematician. Insanity shortly follows in that John has been suffering from schizophrenia since college years and no one has ever really noticed. And Madness was John’s overall behavior, His fixations with his work and being brilliant. How at times he would hurt himself and those around him. Also how great of a mathematician he was could be considered unbelievably crazy.
