Proof
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Gwyneth Paltrow hasn’t been basking in the Hollywood limelight for a while now. Proof marks her fourth movie in three years, and her acting caliber has been slight at best. I mean who was responsible for letting View from the Top escape from the studio lot? These days she’s more known as the wife of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, mother of an Apple and for occasionally spouting relationship advice to her ex Brad Pitt from the cover of People. With all this superficiality, it can be easy to forget that she has a first rate actress rumbling about inside her, waiting for that one juicy role that she can let herself go. Remember Shakespeare in Love? Her portrayal of Catherine in Proof is evidence that her acting chops haven’t dulled with the turn of years. They’ve just been quieted in hibernation, waiting to cat stretch and hungry to devour a rich character like this troubled mathematicians daughter. |
Grade: B+ | Genre: Drama
Proof opens by looking in on a conversation between Catherine and her father, Robert (Anthony Hopkins). It’s her 27th birthday, and they are sharing a bottle of dirt-cheap champagne since her barren existence lacks any other social outlet. Quickly, we find out that this man one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his time who has lost his mind, not to mention his life to an aneurism a week prior. Catherine talks to a ghost on the eve of his funeral. Catherine is a woman who shares her father’s mathematical genius, but also his proclivity for the crazies. The depression that weighs on her chest is suffocating, not allowing herself to get out of bed for days at a time. She struggles with a life of compromise when she’s forced to quit school at Northwestern to look after her father in his mentally crippled state.
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Her highly organized and critical sister Claire (Hope Davis) sweeps in to cleanup Catherine’s vestiges of a life. She gets her a dress so she will be presentable at the wake. She pries her probing words into her relationship with Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal). She puts on the full court press to convince Catherine to move to New York so Claire can have her a stone throw away from being committed. Meanwhile, Catherine bucks this intrusive influence and grits against the fact that her sister was never around in those five years dad was deteriorating under his own mind. Also, her father’s graduate student, Hal, is poking through his mountains of notebooks, looking for kernels of untapped brilliance he can publish. Catherine wants him to quit sifting through the remains of a fractured mind, but he has other motives for lingering at her house. He makes his move on Catherine the night of the wake of all times, and they share a fragile moment that you know is moments away from Catherine taking the hammer to as she questions Hal’s motives for getting close to her. In a moment of extreme vulnerability, she gives him the key to her father’s desk draw that houses a tattered notebook containing an paradigm shifting proof that will take the mathematic community by storm. Yet as Hal gushes over the brilliance of her father’s last lucid work, Catherine professes that she wrote the proof. Her mental instability and the handwriting, that clearly favors her father, draws her abrupt confession into question. Her sister doesn’t believe her, and Hal isn’t exactly leaning in her favor either. Is she wallowing in the credit of her father’s last go at immortality, or did this Northwestern dropout piece together something so extraordinary as to one up the groundbreaking achievements of her father?
This movie plays out like two other mathematically inclined films: A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting. While it doesn’t have the teeth that both of these great films had, its acting powerhouse of Russell Crowe and Matt Damon respectively is equaled in Paltrow’s performance. First, she clearly isn’t 27. Yet her look, mannerisms and frayed maturity betray her until we see her as this shell of her younger self. Next, she completely envelops the volatile Catherine. Her fog of depression won’t let her see her way to the clearing. She won’t ever believe in herself or see that she’s a separate entity from her father. She just assumes his sickness will pass down to her as if in a spirit that escaped through his last living gasp. Paltrow becomes this tortured girl who fights everything around her that could introduce more pain to her shaky life.
Proof is a very good film. It plods along at times and probably could have used a stronger director to work on the pacing and give its explosive moments a bit more impact. It was adapted from the stage so some of those transitional pains come with the territory. Gwyneth Paltrow really makes this film a must-see. She is inspired in a way we haven’t seen in a long time. This depressive well that she toils in just keeps yanking her under until she’s always choking on water. I think this is what the ill-fated Sylvia was striving to be, but it got steeped in fuzzy cinematography and a lackluster screenplay. The fact that she was overlooked by the Academy Award committee for this performance is pretty baffling. Granted, Reese Witherspoon deserves the golden boy for her turn as June Carter in Walk the Line, but Paltrow deserves the recognition for going the extra mile with this unforgettable role.
