10 Movies That Lied So Much They Told The Truth

Ron Howard's Best Picture-winning drama A Beautiful Mind sure is a tricky one, for though it offers a crowd-pleasing account of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash's (Russell Crowe) life, it also plays fast and loose with the truth of his life.

For starters, Nash's schizophrenic hallucinations were entirely aural, not visual, yet in order to clearly convey Nash's mental health issues to the audience, Howard chose to depict them visually regardless.

Akiva Goldsman's script also takes enormous deviations from Nash's personal history for the sake of telling a more streamlined, concise, and ultimately feel-good story.

The climactic pen ceremony sequence, for instance, was entirely fictional and contrived simply to give the film a jolting, tear-jerking finale.

The filmmakers have said that they intended to capture the spirit of Nash's life story even while not clinging rigidly to the facts, and honestly, this wildly uneven account, complete in all its excesses, feels oddly fitting for a film about a man who suffered with schizophrenia for decades.

It is itself a rather schizophrenic piece of work, spinning half-truths and outright falsehoods, as might be a more accurate portrayal of someone's lifelong battle with mental illness than Howard or Goldsman ever possibly intended.