¶ … Beautiful Mind" -- a Film
John Forbes Nash, Jr., an American Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, is such a notable individual that he is the subject of a book, a PBS documentary and a film. The film A Beautiful Mind (Crowe, et al. 2006) eliminates aspects of Nash's life and rewrites other aspects revealed in the book and documentary, possibly to make Nash a more sympathetic character for the audience. However, the film remains true to a consistent theme: in an individual's quest for satisfaction through self-fulfillment, the abnormal can also be the extraordinary.
The book and PBS documentary tell John Forbes Nash, Jr.'s story "from the outside looking in," immediately noting his abnormality in that he is a paranoid schizophrenic. The film takes a different approach, "from the inside looking out," so we experience the world as Nash experiences it and do not realize until half-way through the film that he is mentally ill and delusional. We meet the college roommate, Charlie, his daughter, Marcee, and a mysterious person named William Parcher, who wants Nash to crack a top-secret code. Seeing the world through Nash's eyes, we accept all these people as real; however, about half-way through the film, we realize that Nash is imagining these people and much of his world: a little girl runs through a group of birds but none of the birds is disturbed or flies away, which makes the audience...
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