The controversy surrounding “A Beautiful Mind” concerns the important issue of truth in filming, a phrase that is certain to elicit snickers at what many people would call an oxymoron. In fact, the old axiom that people believe what they read is even truer about what they hear and see.

It is what has made Oliver Stone wealthy. The portrayal of the Vietnam War in his film “Platoon” distorted facts and fed preconceptions to the point that one op-ed piece in the Washington Post quoted a boy who had just sat through it as saying he never realized how badly American troops had behaved in the war. The film perpetuated the image of Vietnam veterans as profane, drug-crazed killers. Indeed the stereotype propaganda continued until the recent film “We Were Soldiers” helped to set the record straight.

“A Beautiful Mind” has been assailed because it purported to be the biography of Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr., but failed to mention his divorce, paranoia-induced anti-Semitism, and various other aspects of his life. Further, fault is being found in the addition of fictional characters and the merging of other characters.

The problem is twofold. A life captured in hundreds of biographical pages must be condensed to fit into the limited time of a film, and it must be told in a manner that attracts audiences. The honest producers, directors and screenwriters try to hone in on and be true to the essence of the subject. More often, they simply use real people and real events to create fictional stories.

One such travesty was 1999’s “Elizabeth” starring Cate Blanchett. The film makers got the famous English queen’s name right, and even the names of a few of her associates, but the chronology was so distorted and the events so intermingled that the movie may just as well have been titled “Alice in Wonderland Meets Joan of Arc in the Land of Oz.” Any schoolchild who witnessed it required historical deprogramming.

“A Beautiful Mind” on the other hand seeks and succeeds in capturing the thrust of its subject, which is the story of an exceptionally bright and unusual man who, despite his paranoid schizophrenia, won the Nobel Prize and regained control of his life. And because Nash is neither a household name nor a historical figure, the poetic license taken in the film actually furthers rather than hinders the story.

Films that do depict historically important events have a greater duty to portray truth. Films such as “A Bridge Too Far”  the story of the World War II Arnhem Campaign  and “Waterloo”  the story of Napoleon’s last stand  did this with mastery.

But perhaps no event resulted in more film-created distortions than Vietnam. Besides “Platoon,” these include “Apocalypse Now,” “Casualties of War,” and “The Deer Hunter” among others. Apparently, some people who opposed the war found it necessary to justify their positions by denigrating those who served. But whatever may have been their motivations, the attempted results have been the same: They have sought to poison the well of truth with vials of lies.

In contrast to this we applaud Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman for “A Beautiful Mind.” They have helped all of us understand the nightmare of schizophrenia and appreciate the Herculean struggle required to control it, and so their film used the man to explain the subject. In this they succeeded admirably, and we were the beneficiaries.