We saw A Beautiful Mind last night. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) Jennifer Connelly is deservedly the critics’ darling, up for a Golden Globe. Ed Harris is underrated and breathtaking to watch in his limited time onscreen. Even more breathtaking is Russell Crowe, who does a wonderful job as John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician with a lifelong struggle against paranoid schizophrenia, except for some moments when he was obviously directed to be a dorky stereotype which, in reality, has nothing to do with schizophrenia. This allows a gratuitous and incongruous scene in which some longhaired Princeton students — it’s the late ’60’s or early ’70’s at this point — make insensitive fun of him. As a psychiatrist whose primary clinical activity is treating schizophrenia, I was far more moved by the film than the non-mental-health-professionals with whom I saw it. What is most difficult to understand about schizophrenic delusions — the subjective, and ultimately terrifying, experience of being unable to differentiate internal fantasies from consensus reality — is well-portrayed here, although through a cinematographic artifice of populating his world with people who turn out to be imagined. No adult schizophrenic I have ever treated or read about has this literal version of an “imaginary playmate”; most of their hallucinatory experiences are of disembodied voices about whose identities they either speculate or remain ignorant. The film also provokes the right questions about the relationship between genius and mental instability. To be overly simplistic, does Nash create because of or in spite of his illness? And, the flip side of the coin, how germane is his intellectual strength — the answer, it seems to me, is not at all obvious — to his perseverence in the face of his illness? Worth seeing.