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Title: Proof

Date Viewed: 10/16/05

Details:

Gwyneth Paltrow (Catherine)

Anthony Hopkins (Robert)

Jake Gyllenhaal (Hal)

Hope Davis (Claire)

Director: John Madden

Play and screenplay: David Auburn

Score: Steven Warbeck

Score: ++

The Review: Excellent psychological drama: intelligent, tense, revealing. It resonates closely with A Beautiful Mind, both exploring the borderlands between creativity and insanity, brilliance and nonsense. The play is infused with mathematics, the essence of proof, and nuances of mind -- both at work and in broken repose.

Robert Llewelyn (Hopkins) was a gifted mathematician and teacher -- "was," because as the film opens, he has died, and his funeral is on the morrow. Catherine (Paltrow) is his oldest daughter, true to the profession and also studying mathematics -- only she broke off to take care of her father during the past five years, during his descent into a benign insanity. But she, too, seems to share not only a talent for math but also a predisposition for instability. One of her father's graduate students (Gyllenhaal) has been going through the notebooks from the past five years in the (likely) vain hopes that something of merit might be buried there. And her younger sister Claire (Davis) is soon to arrive for the funeral. There's more to the setting, much more, but it all evolves clearly and with subtle mystery. One advantage of film over live stage-work is the ability to craft meaningful flashbacks without artifice -- even if the acting is less raw and the personal touch more remote.

For all their intelligence, there is substantial dysfunction as well in this family. The sisters are not best friends. From my perspective, Claire simply has no clue -- about math, about their father, about Catherine, about what it means to tread this path in the borderlands. Although a necessary scriptorial foil to Catherine, Claire is annoyingly dense and manipulatively stupid. One wonders how long it took for this to happen, and why.

Awhile back, I had the opportunity to see the Broadway version of Proof with Anne Heche in the role of Catherine. While both actresses were powerful, Paltrow seems smarter, more fragile and conflicted, better suited to her role.

Late release from 2004.

Good score by Warbeck, slightly more than Glass minimalism.

(17-Oct-05)

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