My Beautiful Mind Essay
Living with Schizophrenia “The mind is indeed a beautiful thing. It is the reason for our ingenuity, artistic originality and maybe even our humanity. What happens however when the mind works against us? When it tricks us into believing that what is not real to be the actual, destroying our sense of being?” (Angelo) We see this played out firsthand in the life of John Forbes Nash Jr. in “A Beautiful Mind.” The film was directed by Ron Howard and starred Russell Crowe, who plays John Nash, Paul Bettany, who plays Nash’s imaginary friend Charles, and Jennifer Connelly, who plays Nash’s wife Alicia. The movie “won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress. It was also nominated for Best Leading Actor, Best Editing, Best Makeup, and Best Score“ (A Beautiful Mind). “A Beautiful Mind” “presents itself as a biography of the flesh-and-blood John Nash. And in fact, it is really only a flashy, sentimental Hollywood movie, inspired by a few particular details of the John Nash story.” (Overstreet) This review is accurate in this description, director Ron Howard delivers a brilliant master peace but it is not all fact. For instance, John Nash never had visual hallucinations and he divorced his wife and later remarried. Though it is not an accurate representation, John Forbes Nash, Jr. did suffer from schizophrenia. John Forbes Nash, Jr., or John Nash as he is referred to in the movie, was born June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia where he was raised. Nash took classes from Bluefield College while still attending Bluefield High School. “After graduating from high school in 1945, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a Westinghouse scholarship, where he studied chemical engineering and chemistry before switching to mathematics. He received both his bachelor's degree and his master's degree in 1948 while at Carnegie
Cited: Angelo. “Beautiful Mind, A (2001)” MovieFreak.com – The Film Palace. 13 January 2010. Web. 04 March 2010. Overstreet, Jeffrey. “A Beautiful Mind (2001)” Rotten Tomatoes. Flixter, Inc. 12 May 2004. Web. 04 March 2010. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/beautiful_mind/ “A Beautiful Mind (Film)” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 04 March 2010. Web. 04 March 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautiful_Mind_(film) “John Forbes Nash, Jr.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 04 March 2010. Web. 04 March 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr “Schizophrenia” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 01 March 2010. Web. 04 March 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia