‘A Beautiful Mind’- A Critical Analysis
The Story of a Prodigy
The versatility of Ron Howard’s ‘A Beautiful Mind’ is certainly a masterpiece, not because of the great acting by Crowe or Connelly only, but mostly because of the beautiful depiction of a mind that is filled with diseases, but radiating something extraordinary!
This is the story of Nash. John Nash. An economist, precisely a Nobel laureate and the father of Game Theory. The film is deciphering the unbelievable genius of prodigious Nash along with his mental sickness that encompasses even the deadly disease schizophrenia.
The Genius
The movie, from its beginning, is showing how Nash was challenging others’ ideas on Princeton’s campus. He refuted some economic theories by one of the pioneers of economics, Adam Smith while graduating from Princeton. As the film tells more and more, it is being seen how Nash had beautifully been becoming a credible Economist with enormous perseverance and attention, spending hours and hours solving some tough mathematical problems. However, the usual commercial movies, generally, show something unusual or abnormal, while picturing a prodigy or genius. But ‘A Beautiful Mind’ is quite different, as it depicts the facts of the life of an extraordinary person without any unnecessary dramatic tickling to the audience.
The Illness
The movie is showing that during his course of developing modern economic theories, Nash started experiencing some mental problems that started growing. The movie shows that it was soon after Nash’s marriage to Alicia when mental troubles started to emerge in Nash’s life. Suddenly he started hallucinating and unusual imaginary characters started to enter his mind’s corridor. He started imagining that the Russian agents were sending him signals. Wasn’t there any signal to the audience about the ideological orientation of the Economist? You should find it yourself!
The beauty of this film’s script is the depiction of that loneliness and the phase of mental illness— every close shot describes the detailing of the weird feeling during that course of illness. And what about the acting of Crowe? It is his eyes and the expressions on his face that flawlessly have picturised the turmoil that the prodigious Nobel laureate had gone through.
The Survival
The movie is a tale of survival. A story of how a genius, suffering from a severe mental illness, overcomes the obstacles with his own will and the love of his family, especially his wife. Alicia, Nash’s wife has been portrayed as the pool of inspiration and courage that made Nash able to come back to the academic world leaving behind all his mental illnesses. And the rest was an epoch-changing history. The history of the formation of Game Theory!
