In the 2001 Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind, there is a moving scene where Princeton college professors acknowledge the achievement of their colleague, John Nash (Russell Crowe) by presenting him with their fountain pens.
Nash is a mathematics genius who is gradually revealed in the film to be chronically schizophrenic.
Crowe won a best actor award from the BAFTA for his performance.
In the 2025 Kirk Jones film, I Swear, John Davidson (Robert Arabayo) walks through a Nottingham University library in complete comfort that he is not disturbing any of the students and staff.
Davidson has suffered Tourette’s for more than 40 years and is, for the first time, wearing a non-invasive wrist device in a clinical trial to control his tics and often profane outbursts.
Arabayo won a best actor award from the BAFTA for his performance.
The latter scene was just as moving.
The viewer has watched John’s story from the early teenage moment when he transitioned from a sport-loving boy into a misunderstood person to both his family and society. It has been an often harrowing watch and one can only imagine the magnification of that horror for Davidson as he lived it?
Writer/director Jones has spared us nothing as he recounts Davidson’s adult life where his only real break is reconnecting with a former school friend Murray (Francesco Piacentini-Smith) who invites him home to dinner.
The visit starts as a disaster but the saviour is Murray’s mother, Dottie (Maxine Peake), a former nurse, who is sympathetic to John’s problem. Dottie is dying of cancer and takes on John as a personal project to take her mind off the six months she has been told she has to live.
John moves away from his hard-trying but dour mother, Heather (Shirley Henderson) and into Dottie’s family home. Here he finds unqualified love and is able to function, albeit with severe facial and neck tics; uncontrolled lashing out of his right arm; and the swearing outbursts.
His trials continue, especially with police, who don’t understand his physical and verbal outbursts.
This is the message of I Swear. People with severe problems or mental illness are not understood by wider society because we don’t know the symptoms, the possible reasons for them, or the way to best handle it. In 1980s Galashiels, Scotland, there is certainly less chance of understanding than nearly 50 years on.
However, this is what John tries to address. Through encouragement of the boss, Tommy (Peter Mullan), at his first job, John considers helping others but it takes Tommy’s death before this occurs.
The beginning of this is brilliantly explored when desperate parents bring their teenage daughter, Lucy (Andrea Bissett) to the community centre where John works to see if he can reach her with a chat.
After the initial duelling of swear words, the two sit and enjoy a cup of tea in one of the movie’s most beautiful scenes.
From this, John begins to advise parents and others with Tourette’s, eventually parlaying this into an MBE for his services to those with it.
Thankfully, Jones puts the award scene at the beginning of the film, sparing viewers a perhaps-agonising two hours of what John’s ultimate fate might become.
We know there is a good ending so we watch with hope and certainty and we leave the cinema with a warm feeling of realising tolerance and understanding is deserved of all people.
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The pen presentation scene in A Beautiful Mind (2001) is not a tradition but an invention of the writers, Akina Goldsman and Sylvia Nasar. In this part of the film, Nash – after the trials and tribulations we have watched in the previous two hours – has just been told he is being considered for a Nobel Prize.
If you are interested in revisiting it, put the following into the search section of YouTube. It goes for 1.06.
Pen ceremony – A Beautiful Mind – Epic Scenes
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