A Beautiful Mind (2001 film) = Finished

SPOILER ALERT

If you haven't seen A Beautiful Mind yet, check it out. It's pretty decent.

CONTINUED ALERT OF SPOILERS

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About 75% of the way into the movie, we learn that Nash has been suffering from delusions. His best friend in college was a lie, as was the friend's daughter, Nash's government handler, and the code-breaking jobs the latter assigned him.

Most TV shows or movies with a similar conceit (Fight Club, Memento, Mr. Robot, etc.) make for intriguing second viewings, as you realize that the clues to their explicit or hidden mysteries were in plain sight the entire time. You misinterpreted what you were watching, or believed an unreliable narrator - but the pieces were there.

Not so with A Beautiful Mind.
I watched it as a kid.
I knew what was coming, but for some reason, it didn't satisfy.

It's a matter of perspective.

If the story was told entirely from Nash's point of view - inside his head, in other words - then that would produce the (clearly desired) effect. If we saw Nash reacting to stimuli we couldn't see, in ways we didn't understand, until the reveal, because we were objective bystanders or occupying the point of view for another character, that would also work. However, A Beautiful Mind mixes the two approaches. We get reasons to doubt Nash's mental state, like hallucinatory characters announcing themselves auditorily before they're seen, signaling their nonsensical presence. Just a few moments later though, you'll have utterly convincing visions of what turn out to be phantom car chases and government facilities. The movie doesn't commit to either world fully, and so leaves itself in a bind.

That's why Fight Club, Memento, and Mr. Robot have such strong explicit voices and perspectives for their main characters. To have an unreliable narrator, you have to have some sort of consistent narrator in the first place.

So yeah. A Beautiful Mind's twist doesn't land nearly as well as it could have, which is a shame. What it does show us in the process, is that a twist is truly satisfying when it recontextualizes old knowledge - not just adds new information.

A Beautiful Mind, though gorgeous to look at and listen to, fails to recognize this.