The movie A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician whose career and life were crippled by schizophrenia. Nash taught at MIT and went on to win the Nobel Prize for his theory of the dynamics of human conflict as it relates to economics.

WLRN Public Radio and Television wrote in a press release:

At the height of his career, after a decade of remarkable mathematical accomplishments, Nash suffered a breakdown. The 30-year-old MIT professor interrupted a lecture to announce he was on the cover of Life magazine—disguised as the pope. He claimed that foreign governments were communicating with him through The New York Times, and he turned down a prestigious post at the University of Chicago because, he said, he was about to become the emperor of Antarctica.

His wife, Alicia, had him committed against his will to a private mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and treated with psychoanalysis. Upon his release, Nash abruptly resigned from MIT, withdrew his pension fund, and fled to Europe. He wandered from country to country, attempting to renounce his American citizenship and be declared a refugee. He saw himself as a secret messenger of God and the focus of an international communist conspiracy. With help from the State Department, Alicia had him deported back to the United States.

Desperate and short of funds, Alicia was forced to commit her husband to the former New Jersey Lunatic Asylum, an understaffed state institution.

In one scene of A Beautiful Mind, one of John's colleagues is talking to Alicia:

"So, Alicia, how are you holding up?"

Alicia responds feebly, "Well, the delusions have passed. They're saying with medications—"

The colleague clarifies, "No, I mean you."

Alicia pauses and explains, "I think often what I feel is obligation, or guilt, over wanting to leave, rage against John, against God. But then I look at him, and I force myself to see the man that I married, and he becomes that man. He's transformed into someone that I love, and I'm transformed into someone that loves him. It's not all the time, but it's enough."

"I think John is a very lucky man," the colleague says.

In the movie, Nash's wife sticks by him through thick and thin. In real life, it wasn't that easy. Alicia eventually divorced him. Later, though, they reconciled. Both the movie and the real story affirm the difficulty—and beauty—of loving those who are hard to love. We wonder at the possibility that someone could love a person who is difficult or unlovely, and then we are jolted back to Calvary's reality: it is the epitome of the beautiful mind. It is the beautiful mind of a holy, just, and merciful God condescending to love a race of undeserving sinners.

Elapsed time: Measured from the beginning of the opening credit, this scene begins at 1:20:18 and ends at 1:22:06.

Content: A Beautiful Mind is rated PG-13 for profanity and sexual vulgarity.