Dir: John Madden, 2005, US, 100mins
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hope Davis
Review by Simon Gray
Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, the 27-year old daughter of an esteemed Chicago mathematician (Hopkins) whose pioneering work once revolutionised his field, but who pays for his genius with his sanity. His last years are spent filling notebooks with gibberish. Catherine, herself a talented mathematician, gives up her studies and withdraws from life in order to care for him. When, after his death, she discloses the existence of a 40-page proof among her father’s papers – a groundbreaking mathematical argument of unprecedented complexity – she claims, astoundingly, to have written it herself.
Into the equation, nudging Catherine towards her own brink of madness, comes one of the father’s PhD students (Gyllenhaal) who wants to believe there are remnants of greatness among the senile doodlings left by his mentor, though he later shows more interest (not of the mathematical kind) in Catherine herself. And then there’s Catherine’s sister (Davis), a pace-setting, list-making New Yorker, full of hokey talk of ‘downtime’ and ‘jojoba conditioner’, who flies out to Chicago with the intention of bringing Catherine back and checking her in for some much-needed East Coast therapy.
John Madden’s intimate conversation piece has all the makings of an absorbing little drama: an impressive cast offering strong performances all round; a punchy screenplay adapted from David Auburn’s much-praised Pulitzer-winning play; not to mention Madden’s precise, nuanced camerawork that never intrudes but always captures the significance of each tiny moment. So why does this promising formula fail to add up to the sum of its impressive parts?
The disappointment may partly be attributed to the film’s inescapable staginess. The adaptation of Proof suffers from the same lack of imagination that made last year’s Closer such an awful film. The play may be well-written but the film is clunky and contrived, a series of see-through plot machinations and know-it-all dialogue. The transition from one medium to the other exposes the material’s inherent limitations and its pretension.
Auburn steers so well clear of any detailed mathematical discourse that one feels the whole mathematical milieu is irrelevant, a sham. Imagine Shine without the music and Pollock without the painting, and you have some idea of how bland this film is. A Darren Aronofsky or a Tom Stoppard might have carved a human drama out of the number-crunching (think Pi or Arcadia); Auburn, however, offers little in the way of either maths or drama. Instead he capitulates to his heroine’s sullen self-pity, asking in all earnestness ‘Is Catherine mad?’ and ‘Is Catherine a genius?’ – as if anyone other than Catherine herself could care less.
Moreover, the film proceeds to answer these questions with all the depth and finesse of a high school literature essay. Is Catherine mad? Answer: no, though she does assault police officers and talk to her dead father. Is Catherine a genius, the author of the brilliant undiscovered proof? Well, if you really want to know that, make sure you stay for the second half of the film which strays limply into a sort of mathematical whodunit.
Along the way, Proof pays lip service to other big themes, such as the legacy of parents and the repression of the self. Catherine is a young woman in denial of her immense inherited talent. Perhaps it is as a result of seeing her father’s painful fall from greatness, watching him day by day outlive his own genius, that she ultimately questions the value of such genius. She tries to conceal from her father the debilitating onset of his senility, but she cannot lie to herself. One of the best moments in the film comes when Catherine, in front of the guests at her father’s funeral, describes the day-to-day indignities of dementia. “What is a great man without his greatness?”, she asks. “I’m glad he’s dead.”
But for the most part, Proof shows little commitment to its own themes. This is not the study of the demise of a genius; nor is it the study of how a relationship bears the strain of greatness. Films like Iris and A Beautiful Mind deal with these subjects much more affectingly.
Proof would like to be about more than it is – as if the titular mathematical proof is some kind of wider metaphor for life’s own impenetrable logic which only a few can master. But such a grand remit is beyond the scope of this somewhat limited and strangely hollow bluffer’s guide.
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Available as part of the Jake Gyllenhaal Collection, released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2nd october 2006.
Extras include:
- Feature Commentary with Director John Madden
- From Stage to Screen: The Making of Proof
- Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary
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