The Soloist Movie Analysis

In terms of movies, in my opinion, The Soloist is a pretty accurate depiction of what schizophrenia looks like. Most movies tend to overexaggerate symptoms of schizophrenia, or they make it seems like the character just develops schizophrenia overnight, but this movie did not do that. From a clinical standpoint, The Soloist is one of the few movies that accurately depicts schizophrenia. Before we meet Nathanial, before seeing his disheveled appearance and his disorganized life, we’re introduced to something pure – Nathanial’s music. I think this is an integral part of the movie, which helps the viewer to understand that while it’s easy to judge a person battling schizophrenia, there needs to be unbiased approaches. The beginning of this movie
I felt that this movie was really long, and I had a hard time staying awake and paying attention. It is a good movie, but to me, it seemed unnecessarily long. The film goes in and shows Nash’s delusions about the cold war and his meetings with secret agents and secret laboratories. Keeping in touch with how schizophrenics are portrayed in society, the movie also portrays Nash as socially awkward/socially inept. For the first few scenes, until the secret agent shows up to show Nash the video, it was a bit hard to discern what was real and what was Nash’s delusions. It takes a while to understand that the agents and Nash’s roommate are all part of Nash’s imagination. I disagreed with this portion of the film – I don’t know anything about John Nash’s story or what he encountered, but to me, an excessive amount of visual hallucinations is wrong. Patients with schizophrenia tend to have more auditory hallucinations rather than visual hallucinations. The characters of Nash’s auditory hallucinations also start by being a little helpful, and then later start making Nash’s life difficult. They seem to help Nash feel less lonely and console him regarding his social awkwardness and isolation. The visual hallucinations portrayed in this movie are not persecutory [not that all schizophrenics have persecutory hallucinations]. The way the movie portrays
I think it’s important to understand that in the medical field, we may not always have a win, but taking each day one at a time, not taking life for granted, teaching people how to live in the moment, those are big parts of the job; they’re necessary components. In regards to this movie, there is a pretty big underlying concept of living in the moment, and I think when we deal with patients with mental health problems or even other medical-surgical issues, that’s something we need to be aware of. Overall, I enjoyed the movie. It was interesting to watch and learn about something that was based off of a true story, and it prompted me to do a little reading about the actual experiment as