John Madden (2005)

Well-acted but implacably uninteresting, Proof is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn, who did the screenplay with Rebecca Miller.  The film didn’t make money or win awards; it’s customary in cases like this to hear claims that the screen version isn’t a patch on the stage original.  It’s hard to see, though, that the basic material has been much changed in transposition and Auburn seems to rely heavily on theatrical clichés like the close proximity of genius and insanity, terror of a forebear’s madness being hereditary, precocious talent burning out early, etc.  He places these in a university setting, which some people seem to think is enough to transform them into something intellectually respectable.   It’s remarkable what you can get away with when your story has an academic context.  If your characters talk in improbably wordy, well-turned sentences (as the characters in Proof often do), it’s fine because that’s what professional clever dicks do, don’t they?

It’s a truism too that mathematicians reach their creative peak very early.  In Proof the mathematics professor Robert (Anthony Hopkins) did brilliant, ground-breaking work in his early twenties, which was followed by decades of mental illness.  He went off the rails at the age of twenty-six.  His daughter Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow), now twenty-seven, is scared of going the same way.  She’s spent years looking after her father in their Chicago home.  When he dies (although he pays Catherine at least one posthumous visit), Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former student of Robert’s, also in his mid-twenties, arrives to go through his mentor’s hoard of notebooks in search of the proof of an important theorem.  Needless to say, he finds it and gets into a relationship with Catherine in the process, although she’s been nervous that Hal will, when he finds the proof, try and appropriate it for his own glory and career.  She then claims she’s actually the author of the proof (you practically see the interval curtain come down as Catherine makes this announcement).  The Wikipedia article on the play helpfully explains that the title refers both to the mathematical proof at the heart of the drama ‘and to the play’s central question: Can Catherine prove the proof’s authorship?’   Subsidiary questions include (a) is Catherine’s insistence that it’s her own work proof that she’s going crazy and (b) is the fact that the proof is in her father’s handwriting evidence of the daughter’s self-delusion or of her extraordinary kinship with him?    The answer to all these questions is another question:  who cares?

As the doomed Robert, Anthony Hopkins is uneven but often impressive.  His movement seems edged in a way that really does suggest, and not obviously, someone not in control of himself – whose mind, and what it wants to express, is imprisoned in the body it belongs to.  Gwyneth Paltrow is a very good actress but, when she dramatises melancholy, she does tend towards forlorn whingeing (she was far too pallid as Sylvia Plath in the poor 2003 biopic).  Jake Gyllenhaal is inherently unconvincing as a geeky mathematician but he commits to the role wholeheartedly and his enthusiastic vitality – when, for example, the maths fraternity confirms the proof is good and Hal rushes downstairs excitedly – is likeable, and a necessary complement to Paltrow’s fine-tuned mournfulness.  Catherine’s sister Claire (Hope Davis), arrived from New York for the father’s funeral, is also relatively invigorating:  she seems to be visiting from the real world even though the character is condescendingly written.  I liked the suppressed hysteria which was always there in Hope Davis’s voice, and especially when Claire was being determinedly upbeat.  (You hear a similar quality in Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice in Catherine’s more animated moments so that this becomes a believable family trait.)  The stage play was a four-hander, and the small roles introduced for the film are perfunctory:  there’s a particularly mechanical exchange between Catherine and a maths professor played by Roshan Seth.

John Madden is a good director of actors and he does a decent job in trying to keep the film in motion.   He makes the most of the fractured time sequence and takes us in and out of scenes at surprising moments (the editor is Mick Audsley).  But there’s a dullness in Madden’s diligent professionalism:  it exudes respect for the ‘prestigious’, life-of-the-mind material – you hear that in Stephen Warbeck’s score too.    It’s typical of the director’s approach that in Robert’s study, which is meant to express the dynamic chaos inside his head, the untidy heaps of books appear to be carefully arranged.  Even the wonky venetian blind looks deliberately, neatly wonky.

18 February 2011