Elements of Mass Communication Embedded in the Film - A Beautiful Mind
Elements of Mass Communication Embedded in the Film - A Beautiful Mind This movie is about the life of a Nobel prize-winning American mathematician named John Forbes Nash Jr. It was also briefly based on the biography book about him written by Sylvia Nasar, which has the same name as the movie. The producer team encoded the information obtained from the biography according to its importance and relevance because there are too much information to squeeze into the a script with limited exposition quotient. Certain details were changed and omitted due to creative license, which usually happens in book transformation into film. According to the screenplay writer, Akiva Goldsman, this movie is not literally about Nash's life. It focused its attention more towards John Nash's genius nature, his experience with schizophrenia and his Nobel Prize award and was reconstructed as a semi-fictional story. In the movie, Nash and his wife, Alicia are portrayed as a devoted couple and showed how they faced the challenges together. But this movie omitted some important events of Nash's life including his homosexuality status, his affair with a nurse, his status as a father to an illegitimate son and his divorce with his wife. Ron Howard, the director, and Akiva Goldsman also added some espionage element into the movie. This is shown in the movie when the government forces (Willian Parcher) are trying to make use of Nash's brains to thwart soviet plot despite his mental illness. The intended message that the movie is trying to convey to the audience is about John Nash's journey in achieving sanity and the unconditional love between him and Alicia throughout his battle with schizophrenia. The production team omit to tell other parts of Nash's life so that it would not diverge the audience's attention from the key message of the movie which was about Nash's journey in achieving sanity. Several channels were used to transmit the intended message to the audience. The film was