IMDb #154 Review: A Beautiful Mind (2004)

Source: Wikipedia

An asocial mathematician finds love and meaningful work at Princeton -- then nearly loses it all to people and things that exist inside his brain. Schizophrenia's a bitch. And it's worse when you don't even know you've got it.

So the math dweeb starts out in college. He doesn't like people; they reciprocate the sentiment. Eccentric, unfocused, yet inexplicably arrogant, he chalks equations on windows, drinks with the boys, and fails to seduce women by plainly stating his intentions. He has zero accomplishments to his name, until he craps out a simple formula to overturn Adam Smith's capitalism, a paper whose influence doesn't become apparent until he's a wrinkly old guy.

He grows up to suck at teaching, and attending his to his wife's needs, and living in reality.

Seeing things from his perspective, the audience doesn't know what's really real (or not) until he does. It's disorienting. Unsettling. Sobering to think: What would convince you that certain facts you know just...aren't?

Well, the genius has to swallow his supermassive ego and strive for the consensus reality. Because the imaginary can't coexist with the real. And certain medication can't coexist with his higher cognitive functions. After a lifetime among sweet lies, he makes his choice.

This just-about-true story displays how love, made of chemicals in the brain, can triumph over paranoia, other chemicals in the brain. How love, which our hero compares to the infinite of the universe, can conquer the demons of mental illness. How one can only find logic in love, the most blissful state of illogic.

(And then the real John Nash goes and dies in a taxi cab crash in March 2015, because the universe is just awful like that.)

135 minutes.