John Nash, a Nobel laureate in economics, developed important ideas early in his career while at Princeton as a graduate student that led to a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  While there, he also developed profound hallucinations and delusions that led to multiple hospitalizations, medications, and the dissolution of his marriage.  After years of a marginal existence centered on a refusal to take medication, Nash slowly reintegrates into his academic community and wins the Nobel.  His wife remarries him after the award and years of taking care of him as a boarder in her home.

That is an approximation of the real story of John Nash, but it is hard to tell from Ron Howard’s glossy film how complex his life was.  The film features good lead performances from Russell Crowe as Nash and Jennifer Connelly as his wife.  Crowe approximates a man with schizophrenia well, capturing the isolation and loss of connection with reality that are hallmarks of the illness.  The presentation of his hallucinations as real in the film is effective in disorienting the viewer and showing explicitly what complex delusions and hallucinations might be like.  The film is marred, however, by a few fatal flaws.  The most obvious is the grating score by James Horner, truly a low point in an undistinguished, high profile career.  Another, however, is the strange realization that almost no other character in the film has any real signs of mental illness or character flaws.  Just when we might start to question why Connelly stays with Crowe, she provides a soliloquy about her difficult life and assures us that she remains sane.  This choice by the filmmakers, to isolate all the considerable mental illness in the film in one character, has the effect of sanctifying mental illness.  The treatments he is offered are presented as barbaric (insulin coma) or having incapacitating side effects (Thorazine).  His choice to live medication free combined with his monopoly on psychopathology might leave the viewer thinking that people with schizophrenia are “special” and perhaps should be left alone.  The millions of patients with this terrible disorder without Nobel prizes, however, would disagree.  ✰ ✰ ½.

MJM 10-05-2011