I wasn’t sure where to post this, so I figured here would be as good as any.
In ** A Beautiful Mind **, Russell Crowe did an excellent job as someone afflicted with mental problems. His body english, I feel, was dead on. A right mix of a uber genius/social outcast and mental case.
Later on in the film, he seemed to have a noticeable funny gait to his walk which, I am guessing, is possibly from the disorder only from observing homeless people talking back to the Mother ship, et all.
But what would cause a gait change?
It might be faulty research on Crowe’s part. Many schizophrenics have coordination problems as a side effect of some antipsychotic medications. He might have been imitating the gait of someone he observed, not realizing it was due to a medication his character wasn’t taking.
I suspect that the gait was deliberately placed into the movie, as the students hanging around the gate were mocking him, and I doubt that was simply ad-libbed into the script.
Many mental patients suffer from the “thorazine shuffle”, difficulty walking caused by the medication they are taking. Further, I suspect, from watching interviews with him (damned few, but those that exist are memorable) that the insulin “therapy” he suffered may have casued some brain damage, at least to his motor funtions.
John Nash’s freinds and aquaintances have been quoted as having seen him wandering about Princeton, on campus and off, like “a homeless man”, and that may have also played a part in the role as it was protrayed.
Additionally, remember that Ron Howard’s/Russell Crowe’s John Nash is not precisely historical, and so liberties can be taken to enhance the audience’s understanding of the terrible toll that mental illness was taking on Nash, without rubbing the audience’s face in a detailled account of 20 years of mental illness, including a divorce from his wife so that Nash could prevent her from committing him against his will. Nash was frankly an unsympathetic character during many of the years of his deepest illness, and it would require a more skilled director than Howard to make that palatable to the movie-going public.
It was easier, by far, to splice in a few segments like the students at the gate, the drawing on windows, and arguments with his fantasies in the courtyard.