A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, follows the college career of John Forbes Nash Jr. From the moment John steps on Princeton's campus, he is treated like an outsider. John is very awkward and even more arrogant. He insults another student's work and research before clumsily running away, creating a disturbance in his wake. Other characters in the movie frequently use the line "the great John Nash" sarcastically, after he has messed something up. Shortly after, John strikes out with an attractive girl after asking if she would like to skip all the talking and just go straight to sex, and is told by a professor that his grades will not get him anywhere in life. John eventually develops an economic theory that disproves years of precedent, which leads to him getting a job as a codebreaker for the U.S. government. John quickly becomes the "best natural codebreaker" that the government has ever seen.

Through his codebreaking, John discovers a bomb threat and is tasked with decoding hidden Russian messages in newspapers from around the country. So we think. John is picked up by what he believes to be Russian spies and taken away.

He wakes up in a mental hospital, where doctors tell him and his wife that he has schizophrenia. This new knowledge causes the audience to question everything they have seen up to this point, wondering what is real and what was John's imagination. For the remainder of the film, John struggles with his diagnosis, starting and stopping his medication, attempting to continue his work while having his mind dulled by the medicine, and deciphering what is real and what is not. This leads to many potentially catastrophic situations, including John almost drowning his newborn baby and accidentally hitting his wife while trying to protect her from an imaginary person in their house. Day to day life has completely changed for John. While teaching at Princeton, he has to ask one student if a different student is actually there, or if he is imagining it. He has a breakdown on campus and creates another major disturbance there, as he struggles to control his illness. John is eventually recognized for his groundbreaking work in economics and is given a Nobel prize, finally reflecting all the years of work and trials he has gone through. A Beautiful Mind has a very deep, complex storyline that is enhanced through beautiful cinematography and truly puts the audience in John's shoes through the discovery that many events and characters in the film did not actually exist. John's doctor poetically explains his illness, asking his wife to "Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?" This line, and many other excellent pieces of dialogue show how crippling John's illness is, and how hard he must work to overcome and endure it.