Actors - A Beautiful Mind

Home > Listing Index > Actors > A Beautiful Mind

	Actors - A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a book and Academy Award-winning film (starring Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Christopher Plummer, and Paul Bettany) about the Nobel Prize (Economics) winning mathematician John Nash and his experiences of schizophrenia. The biography, written by Sylvia Nasar, was published in 1998. The movie, inspired by the biography of the same name, was released in 2001.

The movie's inspiration

The book A Beautiful Mind is a detailed biography of John Nash, including his work as a mathematician and his private life. The book won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as making the New York Times bestseller list. It is particularly notable for the clarity and detail; and accessibility of its treatment of Nash's mathematical accomplishments.

Plot

As the story unfolds, Nash is able to work through his illness to (in his words) "matter" in the world. This film is essentially a story of how a brilliant man was able to live with the vicissitudes of a debilitating mental illness to attain a true sense of accomplishment, or some would say, even a sense of greatness.

At the beginning of the film, John Nash arrives as a new graduate student at Princeton University. He is a recipient of the prestigious Carnegie Prize for mathematics. He meets his roommate Charles, a literature student, who soon becomes his best friend. He also meets a group of other promising math and science graduate students, Martin Hansen, Sol, and Bender, with whom he strikes up an awkward friendship.

The first part of the film establishes Nash's intellectual stamina and his propensity to be too outspoken in his social life. He admits that he is better with numbers than people, saying, "I don't like them much, and they don't much like me." He sometimes goes out to a bar with his fellow students to try to meet women, but is always unsuccessful. However, the experience is what ultimately inspires his fruitful work in the concept of governing dynamics, a theory in mathematical economics.

After the conclusion of Nash's studies as a student at Princeton, he accepts a prestigious appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with his friends Sol and Bender. It is while at this post that he meets Alicia, a student who he falls in love with and eventually marries.

While at Princeton, Nash runs into his former roommate Charles and meets Charles's young niece Marcee. He also encounters a mysterious Department of Defense agent, William Parcher. Nash is invited to a United States Department of Defense facility (The Pentagon) to crack a complex encryption of an enemy telecommunication. Nash is able to decipher the code mentally. Parcher observes Nash's performance from above, while partially concealed behind a screen. (His general appearance and behaviour is similar to that of the so-called Men in Black.) Parcher later encourages Nash to look for patterns in magazines and newspapers, ostensibly to thwart a Soviet plot. Nash becomes increasingly paranoid and begins to behave erratically.

After observing this erratic behavior, Sol follows Nash during one of his late night drops of "top secret Soviet codes". Sol sees Nash place the documents into a drop-box at a long empty building, and reports this behaviour to Nash's superiors. He is forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric facility. Initially, Nash's internment seemed like confirmation of his belief that the Soviets were trying to extract information from him, and that getting picked up by the officials of that psychiatric facility was a kidnapping by Soviet agents.

Alicia, desperate to help her husband, visits the drop-box and retrieves the never-opened "top secret" documents that Nash delivered there. When confronted with this evidence, Nash is finally convinced that he has been hallucinating. The Department of Defense agent William Parcher and Nash's secret assignment to decode Soviet messages was in fact all a delusion. Even more surprisingly, Nash's friend Charles and his niece Marcee are also only products of Nash's mind.

Nash is released on the condition that he agrees to take antipsychotic medication. However, these drugs create negative side-effects that impact his relationship with his wife and, most dramatically, his intellect. Frustrated, Nash secretly stops taking his medication, triggering a relapse of his psychosis. While bathing his infant son, Nash becomes distracted and wanders off. Alicia barely manages to save their child from being drowned. When she confronts Nash, he claims that his (hallucinatory) friend Charles was watching their son. Charles, Marcee, and Parcher all appear to John and urge him to kill his wife rather than allow her to lock him up again. Nash finally realizes these people are not "real" when he observes that Marcee is the same age that she was when he first met her several years before. Only then does he accept that all three of these people are, in fact, part of his psychosis.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for A Beautiful Mind ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article A Beautiful Mind; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay