5. A Beautiful Mind Contains 99% Less Anti-Semitism
DreamWorksJohn Forbes Nash really did have a beautiful mind. It was just tempered somewhat by his also suffering from schizophrenia, which meant that whilst Nash made some amazing breakthroughs in the fields of mathematics and game theory - both of which you need a pretty big brain to get your head around - he also experienced serious delusions and hallucinations which made him appear erratic at best, and totally nuts at worst. Russell Crowe does a great job of playing both sides of Nash in this Academy Award-winning drama of how a brilliant man is ground down by mental health issues, and the devastating effect that has on his friends and loved ones (especially his long-suffering wife Alicia, played by Jennifer Connelly).
What really happened: Hoo boy, buckle your seatbelts, because this one is gonna get pretty bumpy. In the film Nash's delusions get so bad that he completely imagines a whole subplot about being recruited by the government to use his intellect in order to crack Soviet codes, eventually becoming embroiled in the Cold War way more than a Princeton professor probably should, even winding up in the middle of a gunfight between Russian agents and Ed Harris's shady Pentagon spook William Parcher. It's the film's big twist when we realise that all of this has been happening in his head, and rather than trying to break out of a Soviet facility, he's actually in a mental institution. Which is total hogwash. Not only was this not how Nash's hallucinations manifested themselves, it's a total misunderstanding of schizophrenia. In reality, the professor "just" heard voices in his head, rather than thinking that Ed Harris and Paul Bettany were giving him secret missions to bring down the commies. We understand that the filmmakers would probably struggle with probably rendering this, and the mental stress that comes with it, on screen; but c'mon. Massive shoot outs between multiple secret agents that totally happen in Russell Crowe's head? Really? The tragic romance between Crowe and Connelly is a load of baloney and all. The couple did marry, but divorced a few years after, rather than suffering through all the drama together and eventually coming up trumps when he wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. The couple did get back together years later, despite Nash's best efforts - he'd been sleeping around with men and women the whole time they were married, and plenty more in the intervening years. One change to Nash's character we can get behind in the film is that they took out all of his crazy rants about Jewish people. The real professor was crazy anti-Semitic, something he's since attributed to his schizophrenia. It got worse when he stopped taking his medication, true, but he wasn't actually allowed to give a speech when he received his Nobel Prize, for fear that he'd start off on another of his colourful rants about how the Jews run the world.