A Rural Bengali Mind Encounters a Beautiful Mind (Film 2001)

Photo Courtesy: GR Stocks | Unsplash.com

A few days ago, while organising a shelf in one of the least visited corners of our ancestral village home in Bengal, I found my old disc folio covered in dust and dirt. It was that bright green kiddish one I used in my early teen years to store my favourite compact discs- ranging from English dictionaries, encyclopedias, Super Mario games, expired copies of desktop antiviruses and a few movies. Most of those movie discs were bought for 10 rupees each from a shop named CD Corner in the long-trailing street market adjacent to Station Road in Bolpur.

In those shops, film discs were priced according to the number of kissing scenes available. Hollywood movies were always in demand because of plenty of them. There was no way to be sure of the films my folio discs were containing. Over time, the cheap print on the wrappers has paled as the CD shops vanished from the roadside markets.

I chose one. It contained A Beautiful Mind (2001) by Ron Howard. A Beautiful Mind is a biographical film based on an adapted version of the life of stalwart American mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.

The movie opens in 1947, at Princeton University. The film version of Nash, starred by Russell Crowe, appears there as a toffee-nosed graduate student who abstains from attending classes in fear of dulling his inherent ingenious. This cocksure prefers windowpanes over pen and paper to channel his creative outburst to yield a truly original idea. And, never minds terming a game of board as ‘flawed’ when he loses. He is proudly incommunicado, willing only to talk to his roommate Charles Herman, starred by Paul Bettany.

On a rare occasion, at a bar, while arguing with his friends on the most efficient way to approach a girl, Nash accidentally stumbles upon a unique theory of game that challenges the basic mechanisms of Adam Smith’s governing dynamics. With this breakthrough, he lands on prestigious employment at a top defence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His pride flares up with a cover appearance in Forbes magazine. Subsequently, for his exceptional cryptographic abilities, Nash got appointed to a top-secret mission to thwart a Russian conspiracy with William Parcher, starred by Ed Harris, a shadowy godfather at the CIA.

At the time his career graph rushes upwardly, this egghead meets her lady love Alicia, starred by Jennifer Connelly, with who he takes classes at MIT on a mundane level. A mere linear biography of a man of letter takes an extraordinary turn when Nash is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Alicia comes to know the world his husband is engrossed in most of the time is nothing more than a hallucination of his mind; Nash’s closest acquaintances are living only between the electric signals of his neurons. The couple was expecting their first child then.

Alicia stands by her man as psychiatrist Dr Rosen (Christopher Plummer), a gruesome Soviet spy in Nash’s world of paranoia, diagnoses him with painful insulin shock therapy. Following a short period of jovial recovery, the illness relapses when he secretly stops taking antipsychotic medicines to avoid the depressive side effects. But this time, anguished over his inability to differentiate between reality and illusions, and their consequences on his loved wife and son, Nash decides to counter his delusions. Though wrinkled by a tormenting married life, Alecia refuses to lose hope in life. Only with her unwearying support, Nash, who was "born with two helpings of the brain and a half-helping of heart," finally finds the authentic voice of the heart.

I did not know much about paranoid schizophrenia before watching this film. Howard's portrayal of schizophrenia and Nash’s struggle to conquer the mental impediment becomes a sensitive visual narrative of revelation and acceptance. I could not settle myself up before googling up more about the man, himself. “The movies have a way of pushing mental illness into corners,” rightly noted eminent film critic Roger Ebert in his review of this film. He added, “It is grotesque, sensational, cute, funny, willful, tragic or perverse. Here it is simply a disease, which renders life almost but not quite impossible for Nash and his wife before he becomes one of the lucky ones to pull out of the downward spiral.”

A Beautiful Mind is not about mourning a tragic trajectory of life, but a celebration of love. It is entirely okay to get ill mentally and there is nothing more healing than the warmth and care of close ones. In his Nobel speech, Nash says, "I've always believed in numbers. In the equations and logics that lead to reason; but after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides the reason? My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional and back, and I have made the most important discovery of my career... the most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found."

In our childhood, it was common to see one or two of the neighbours often going into an uncanny state of trance to talk, cry or laugh with someone invisible. People believed evil souls have taken over their consciousness. Shamans, in some extravagant and gruesome processes, are used to curing them. But the effect lasted only for a while. In this film, I have fortuitously found a resemblance between Nash’s schizophrenia and the witchcraft of my childhood days. This film has made me realise those victims from my village were in greater need of proper medication and emotional support than the traditional healer’s broomstick beatings. Rather than stigmatising, we should go the extra mile to ensure that none of them is abandoned without a loved one’s tight hug.