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Movie Analysis
Precious Abidoye

Movie analysis of The Beautiful Mind

Overview
The film “A BEAUTIFUL MIND” characterizes the story of the brilliant mathematician John Forbes Nash who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. This film was directed by Ron Howard and it’s based on the true life story of a genius mathematician Nash which is portrayed by the actor Russell Crowe. At the beginning of the movie Nash starts his career at Princeton University as a mathematics graduate student where he was well known for his intelligence. Nash is an arrogant, awkward socially-inept mathematics student, who spent most of his time making effort to discover a revolutionary equation in mathematics. At half way through the film, we discover that half of the places and situations that occur in the film are only illusions within Nash’s “beautiful” mind. This is when it was discovered that Nash is suffering from a severe illness which is schizophrenia. One of the first imaginary characters that Nash develops in his mind is his roommate Charles Herman, (Paul Bettany) a student of English Literature.
Schizophrenia has been defined as a split mind. It refers not to a multiple personality split but rather to a split from reality that shows itself in disorganized thinking, disturbed perceptions, and inappropriate emotions and actions. Nash experienced severe delusions and hallucinations which were then diagnosed as symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia are when being preoccupied with delusions, or hallucinations, generally with cases of persecution or grandiosity. According to the DSM-IV the following is the diagnostic criteria the symptoms of schizophrenia includes delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech (e.g. frequent derailment or incoherence), grossly disorganized behavior etc.
The characters of John Nash accurately exhibit mental illness because of the symptoms which he exhibited showed that he has schizophrenia and these symptoms include severe delusions and hallucinations which were diagnosed

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