It is a twenty-year-old movie. My previous attempts to read the book and watch the movie did not go well as I did not find it interesting. But things fell into place now. I could not only make sense of the movie this time but awed by it.
John Nash arrives at Princeton with a
scholarship to study mathematics. He is good at numbers but not so with people.
One of his students, Alicia, falls in love with John and they get married. John’s
talent for numbers attracts unusual attention. He gets involved with defense to
help them in decoding Russian plots. As the situation turns violent, he decides
not to continue with the project.
But soon he is chased by a psychiatrist and
his assistants who admit him to a hospital. There he is diagnosed for a mental
illness – schizophrenia. His work for a defense project was a hallucination.
And three people he sees often are present only in his illusions. He is put on
medication. Refusing to take the prescribed drugs, his situation becomes worse.
But he slowly accepts his illusions and begins his attempts to put a distance
between those three people who haunts him in his imagination.
John goes back to Princeton and his friend
gives him a job to work from library. John though still sees those three people
from his imagination, succeeds in ignoring them. He is given teaching responsibilities
too in the University. Many years later he gets awarded a Nobel Prize for his
work in Mathematics.
There is not anything beautiful in the movie. John’s mind is not beautiful but a mad one. But the support he gets from his wife is extraordinary. His illusions appear so real so his struggle to get through it too was an uphill task.
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