From the director of Shakespeare
in Love and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin comes this adaptation of a
play of the same name.  Gwyneth Paltrow shows again her skill at capturing
mental anguish, this time as the daughter of a schizophrenic mathematics
professor.  Catherine has been caring for her father Robert for years as he
struggled with his disease, and he has just died.  The funeral is coming up,
and her sister is flying in from New York to attend.  The film starts with
Catherine arguing with her dead father, and we wonder whether she herself is
sane.  Soon, so does everyone else.  When she claims to be the creator of a
proof of a major theorem in mathematics, nobody believes her.  They think she
is taking after her father, who spent his final years filling his notebooks
with nonsense.  The plot revolves around the question whether there is any
proof of Catherine’s authorship or her sanity. 

Proof features Anthony
Hopkins as Catherine’s father, Jake Gyllenhaal as the young mathematics
professor intent on going through the late great man’s notebooks to search for
hidden gems, and Hope Davis as the controlling older sister who thinks she
knows what is best for Catherine.  Nearly all performances are overwrought and
dramatic, as if the actors thought they were still acting in live theater. 
Although the film uses some ideas in mathematics as ways to raise questions
about mental illness (in ways rather reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind),
it ultimately has very little to offer in its portrayal of insanity.  It is a
conventional sort of film with middlebrow ambitions.  The scenes of obvious
dramatic tension are especially ham fisted, and on watching them a second time
they make you cringe.  Gyllenhaal and Hopkins’ performances are dull and
wooden.  The director’s commentary on the DVD has very little to reveal, the
deleted scenes are not particularly interesting, and the "Making of" featurette
is entirely forgettable. 

The most interesting part of the
direction by John Madden is his frequent jumping backward and forward in time. 
A character can be opening a door at one time and then when she steps into the
room she will be going back into the past.  This helps to destabilize the
narrative flow, helping the viewers to question how firm is Catherine’s grip on
current reality and at the same time providing background on her relationship
with her father.  Even though Paltrow has already given a similar performance
in Sylvia (reviewed in Metapsychology
8: 18), and here she is constrained by the cumbersome plot, she still
lights up the screen.  She plays her role with conviction, being simultaneously
fragile, subdued and angry.  While Proof is not a film I’d recommend, Paltrow
at least makes it bearable. 

© 2004 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Movies