Proof is based on a play by David Auburn, and while it can't overcome the flaws of its source, it's a better movie than I'd expected it to be.
Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Catherine, whose father Robert (Anthony Hopkins) has just died after several years of slow mental deterioration. In his youth, Robert had been a brilliant mathematician, making revolutionary discoveries before he reached 30. The great breakthroughs in mathematics, we're told, are made by the young, and Catherine may have forfeited the most productive years of her own career by spending the last few years caring for her father.
Also on hand are older sister Claire (Hope Davis), in town for the funeral, who fears that the stress of the last few years may have put Catherine on the brink of her own mental and emotional collapse; and Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former student of Robert's, who is going through the 103 notebooks of scribbles that Robert left behind in hope of finding something valuable in them.
Paltrow isn't quite right for the lead role; she gets Catherine's paranoia right, and the fear that she might have inherited her father's "tendency to instability," but I never quite believed her character's genius-level intelligence. To be sure, one of the hardest acting challenges is to play a character whose intelligence level differs significantly from your own -- it's no accident that playing mental deficiency is a shortcut to an Oscar nomination -- and playing up the intelligence scale is, I think, even harder than playing down.
But the rest of the cast is top-notch. Hopkins does communicate intelligence, and his painful mental deterioration is entirely believable. Davis has the most thankless role, yet another brittle and bitchy sibling who swoops in to take charge of everything, but she plays it very nicely.
The play is well-adapted for the screen (by Auburn and Rebecca Miller), but its major flaws -- the "genius = madness" trope, an overuse of the "talking to the dead" device -- are still annoying. On the whole, Proof is an entertaining movie, better than the play really deserves.
1 comment:
Visiting via Lynne. I saw this movie last night and thought Paltrow was very good. Hollywood usually embarrasses me when it tries to portray genius. In the old days, Paltrow would have been given glasses and an officious manner. I absolutely could believe she was a genius. They come in all shapes and forms and don't always "act" so smart (another believable portrayal of genius without glasses - Amadeus). She had great chemistry with Hopkins.
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