>>REVIEW
PROOF
STARRING Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal
DIRECTED BY John Madden
Opens Friday, September 16
Check listings
Math isn’t often thought of as a sexy topic. And this seems doubly so in Hollywood. Writers, rock stars, artists, explorers, politicians, even the occasional scientist – these are the guys who get the biopics and the marquee placement.
Now, in Proof, a stagy adaptation of David Auburn’s celebrated play of the same name, an attempt is being made to right that wrong. Although director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) isn’t able to fully lift the film beyond its theatrical roots, his Proof does finally give the mathematician his due. At its best, it wonderfully illuminates math as art and shows how numbers can express the human condition as fully and beautifully as words on a page, notes on sheet music or brush strokes on a canvas.
Starring as the housebound, unhinged daughter of a brilliant mathematician, Gwyneth Paltrow is particularly whiny as the mood-swinging Catherine. After her father, a beloved giant-in-his-field-type who went insane in his final years, dies, Catherine tries to stave off depression and an abiding fear of her own precarious mental state.
The question of Catherine’s insanity becomes one of the central themes in the film as two characters descend on the suburban Chicago home Paltrow’s mopey 27-year-old has been holed up in. First there’s Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a grad student who had been an advisee of Catherine’s dad. Hoping to sift through the man’s remaining notebooks – most of which are full of meaningless scribbles and incoherent ramblings – Hal comes and goes, attempting to woo Catherine in the process. Then there’s Catherine’s shrewish older sister, Claire (Hope Davis), who has flown in from New York and is aiming to quickly sell the house and drag Catherine to Manhattan with her.
As Catherine erupts into a succession of angry outbursts a brilliant proof is uncovered. Shut away in a drawer of her father’s study, the proof – which is touted as one of the most groundbreaking mathematical works ever written – becomes the centre of a battle that uncovers the secrets of both Catherine’s and her father’s past.
Set up as a mystery about the authorship of the titular mathematical work – after Catherine claims she wrote the proof, both the audience and other characters are forced to question who’s responsible for the brilliant mathematics at hand – the film is driven by a deliciously unfamiliar scenario. And it’s truly the numbers that are the star throughout. That the numbers are used to explore a familiar story – a child trying to emerge from her parent’s shadow – is what gives Proof its meat.
At one point in the film, Catherine, who was studying mathematics at Northwestern before she left to care for her dad, shows her professor a proof she’d been working on instead of the assigned homework. The frustrated prof looks over the little blue booklet and tells her that math isn’t jazz. But, of course, it is. And that’s what Proof demonstrates – math can be creative, boundary-pushing riffs on the status quo and an opera of numbers. |
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