A Beautiful Mind (Widescreen Awards Edition)

A Beautiful Mind (Widescreen Awards Edition) Review

I thoroughly enjoyed 'A Beautiful Mind.' It's one of those very rare movies made for an audience of reasonably mature and intelligent adults as opposed to low IQ inner-city gangbangers with a mental age of around 14 who seem to be the target audience of most Hollywood fare today.

The plot is different and holds our interest to the end; the camera work is technical perfection with none of that faddish hand-held camera nonsense; the Princeton settings are gorgeous; and the actors are without exception excellent, with Russell Crowe giving a sensitive and totally convincing performance as the brilliant and afflicted mathematician, John Nash, a man suffering from schizophrenia.

But what exactly is schizophrenia? According to Wikipedia, it is "a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking with significant social or occupational dysfunction" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia).

This seems clear enough, since we have all been convinced of the reality of "mental" illness. But if we turn to Thomas Szasz Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry we find a highly intelligent professional psychiatrist informing us that, not only is schizophrenia a myth, but that there is no such thing as "mental illness", the term "illness" being something that can legitimately be applied only to physical bodies and not to minds, mind being something of an entirely different order.

So what's going on here? In the movie, Nash is eventually able to come to terms with his schizophrenia by realizing that the figures he continues to hallucinate, and who seem to him to be flesh-and-blood realities every bit as real as the people around him, are wholly illusory and simply projections of his own mind.

If he had been born in Asia and had come in contact with the non-dual perspective he might have learned that the whole of reality is similarly a projection of mind and entirely illusory; that his mind is only doing what is natural to it in projecting a world made entirely of Consciousness; and that the only difference between him and others is that, by some quirk, his mind has added a few extra events (which only he is able to perceive) to the world he shares with all of us. He might then have gone on to realize that, by leading him to a truer understanding of mind, what seemed to him at first to be a curse was in fact a Grace.

These notions lead us into the field of Nonduality and anyone interested in pursuing them further could do no better than to read a book such as Leo Hartong's Awakening to the Dream. Of the vast literature on Nonduality, this is the simplest and clearest account I've ever found.

But to return to the movie, please don't miss it. At its best, the modern movie can and should be a work of art, and the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' certainly qualifies as that.

A Beautiful Mind (Widescreen Awards Edition) Overview

Winner of 4 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, A Beautiful Mind is directed by Academy Award winner Ron Howard and produced by long-time partner and collaborator, Academy Award winner Brian Grazer. A Beautiful Mind stars Russell Crowe in an astonishing performance as brilliant mathematician John Nash, on the brink of international acclaim when he becomes entangled in a mysterious conspiracy. Now only his devoted wife (Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly) can help him in this powerful story of courage, passion and triumph.

A Beautiful Mind (Widescreen Awards Edition) Specifications

A Beautiful Mind manages to twist enough pathos out of John Nash's incredible life story to redeem an at-times goofy portrayal of schizophrenia. Russell Crowe tackles the role with characteristic fervor, playing the Nobel prize-winning mathematician from his days at Princeton, where he developed a groundbreaking economic theory, to his meteoric rise to the cover of Forbes magazine and an MIT professorship, and on through to his eventual dismissal due to schizophrenic delusions. Of course, it is the delusions that fascinate director Ron Howard and, predictably, go astray. Nash's other world, populated as it is by a maniacal Department of Defense agent (Ed Harris), an imagined college roommate who seems straight out of Dead Poets Society, and an orphaned girl, is so fluid and scriptlike as to make the viewer wonder if schizophrenia is really as slick as depicted. Crowe's physical intensity drags us along as he works admirably to carry the film on his considerable shoulders. No doubt the story of Nash's amazing will to recover his life without the aid of medication is a worthy one, his eventual triumph heartening. Unfortunately, Howard's flashy style is unable to convey much of it. --Fionn Meade

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