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Essay on A Beautiful Mind (Movie)

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As the story unfolds, Nash is able to work through his illness to (in his words) "matter" in the world. This film is essentially a story of how a brilliant man was able to live with the vicissitudes of a debilitating mental illness to attain a true sense of accomplishment, or some would say, even a sense of greatness. Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. At the beginning of the film, John Nash arrives as a new graduate student at Princeton University. He is a recipient of the prestigious Carnegie Prize for mathematics. He meets his roommate Charles, a literature student, who soon becomes his best friend. He also meets a group of other promising math and science graduate students, Martin Hansen, Sol, and Bender, with whom …show more content…

After a harrowing chase scene and exchange of gunfire, Nash becomes increasingly paranoid and begins to behave erratically. Russell Crowe as John NashAfter observing this erratic behavior, Sol follows Nash during one of his late night drops off "top secret Soviet codes". Sol sees Nash place the documents into a drop-box at a long empty building, and reports this behaviour to Nash's superiors. He sees that he is being watched during a lecture. Caught trying to flee, he is forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric facility. Initially, Nash's internment seemed like confirmation of his belief that the Soviets were trying to extract information from him, and that getting picked up by the officials of that psychiatric facility was a kidnapping by Soviet agents. Alicia, desperate to help her husband, visits the drop-box and retrieves the never-opened "top secret" documents that Nash delivered there. When confronted with this evidence, Nash is finally convinced that he has been hallucinating. The Department of Defense agent William Parcher and Nash's secret assignment to decode Soviet messages was in fact all a delusion. Even more surprisingly, Nash's friend Charles and his niece Marcee are also only products of Nash's mind. After a painful series of insulin shock therapy sessions, Nash is released on the condition that he agrees to

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