SCREEN

PROOF

Josh Bell

If movies have taught us anything, it's that all mathematical geniuses are crazy. In the grand tradition of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting and Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, Paltrow plays a troubled mathematician in Proof, based on David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. As a bonus, Proof features not one but two unstable math geniuses, as Paltrow's Catherine is reeling from the death of her father, Robert (Hopkins), a legend in the mathematical field who spent the last years of his life in the grips of mental illness.


After his death, Robert leaves behind more than 100 notebooks of seemingly incoherent scribblings, but student Hal (Gyllenhaal) wants to sort through them to see if he can discover some final spark of Robert's math skills. Catherine is distraught over her father's death and resistant to this intrusive stranger.


Catherine also is bothered by her sister Claire (Davis), a polished yuppie who wants to take Catherine away from her childhood home to keep an eye on her. In the midst of the turmoil, Hal discovers a groundbreaking mathematical proof in Robert's desk—one that may have been written by the man himself.


The mystery of the proof, which is the film's most interesting element, doesn't show up until halfway through and is treated as almost an afterthought to sappy, manipulative relationship stories, as Catherine falls for Hal, deals with Claire and comes to terms with her father's death. Using the search for the solution to a mathematical mystery as a metaphor for grief is interesting, but the screenplay by Auburn and Rebecca Miller, under pedestrian direction by Shakespeare in Love's John Madden, doesn't do much to flesh it out. Instead it's all hand-wringing and maudlin, Oscar-bait speeches.


The worst thing about Proof is Paltrow, who can be a great actress but is deeply wrong for the part of Catherine, even if she did play it on stage in London. It's not just that she has trouble playing the part of a math genius; she seems to have trouble at times playing the part of a human being, coming off as petulant and whiny when Catherine is meant to be grieving and deeply sad. Despite the occasional emotional connection, Proof is a muddled mess, as dry and methodical as a math problem.

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