Film Review |
Who Did the Math?: Proofby George Sax |
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The transfer of theatrical works to film is a trickier business than it was in a bygone era. Time was, the film industry heavily relied on the stage as a source.
No more. Not only are there fewer non-musical properties to buy, but movies are kinetically and generically more removed from theatre’s conventions and concerns. Not that people don’t try to affect the transition from time to time. In the case of Proof, John Madden’s adaptation of the prize-winning play by David Auburn, the difficulties seemed to have weighed heavily on the project, perhaps more than was necessary. The play’s ideas seem to have been flattened and dealt with cursorily.
The film opens at night in a big, comfortably dowdy house where Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow), whose 27th birthday it is, swigs bubbly from a bottle while chatting with her dad (Anthony Hopkins). He insistently urges her to get out, let loose, stop being a recluse.
This might be well-advised parental urging, if only it was real. Dad, you see, is dead, and his funeral is the next day, as he reminds her. Still, she’s not really alone. Down from upstairs comes Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), to a cool reception. He’s a junior math instructor from the nearby University of Chicago, where her father was a reigning, internationally celebrated genius, until he began to go bonkers and retired to this house.
Hal has been poring over the old man’s notebooks, looking for any solid unpublished work, the discovery of which would lift Hal from the dreary, post-doctoral world of drudgery and anonymity he’s toiling in. (He’s already 26, and innovative mathematics is a young man’s game, a largely masculine one, as he reluctantly admits.) Catherine had interrupted her own budding career in the discipline to care for her father.
High-strung, a little belligerent, and distracted, she’s been wondering if she has inherited her father’s tendency to madness. This becomes an even more critical question when she produces another notebook containing, she claims, the ground-breaking proof her father had been working on in his lucid interludes. But does it? Where did she really get it? Hal—who may or may not be genuinely attracted to her—proposes a way to find out, which sounded a little like Karl Popper’s Falsifiability Principle to me. (But, given my own wretched innumeracy, you should pay me no heed.)
Proof is really a kind of intellectually-toned, mystery melodrama, played out in a setting that’s both familiar and arcane. There’s the vaguely Oedipal, ostensibly tense family dynamics, including an older daughter (Hope Davis) who returns for the funeral and to protect sis from herself. And there’s the inaccessibly abstruse realm of math theory.
On stage, this might have developed some emotional zing, but, whatever problems the filmmakers encountered, Madden and, more surprisingly, Auburn, haven’t solved them very well. The play has been “enlarged;” it moves around the Chicago area, sometimes a little too energetically, shifting back and forth in time. I’m guessing it’s also been diminished at the same time. At ninety-nine minutes, it feels as if some of the play’s material has been purged to make room for the cinematic technique.
Proof is also at least a little depleted of energy. There isn’t much sense of urgency in the characters’ dilemmas or interactions. And Madden’s film, for all its applications of editing and cinematography, never acquires a consistent rhythm.
The performances, especially Paltrow and Gyllenhaal’s, are fine, but they’re more involving and dynamic than the movie. Proof labors too hard on too little.
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