Unstable mathematical geniuses — don’t you adore them? What with their prime numbers and their cubed roots and their picturesque mental illnesses. It hasn’t been that long since Russell Crowe, playing mathematician John Nash, proved what a beautiful mind he had by hallucinating and wearing trousers that were a couple of inches too short.
Now, in Proof, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins play a mathematical-genius daughter/daddy team. Gwyneth gets to be a tortured talent by imagining that her dead father is alive and shuffling into the kitchen for concerned late-night chats and Hopkins, as so often in the past, does a lot of sudden shouting. Two other characters summarise his situation in the following exchange: ”The man was a genius!” ”He was also nuts!” And this is the subtly imagined dichotomy in which rewarding emotional drama is supposed to reside.
Hopkins plays a distinguished mathematician, deceased just before the action begins, whose best work was in his early twenties and who lately suffered from a psychiatric disorder. His outstandingly clever but unhappy daughter (Paltrow) dropped out of college to care for him.
Hopkins’s super-bright research assistant (Jake Gyllenhaal) now wishes to gain access to Gwyneth’s knickers and also to her stash of dad’s notebooks, which may contain a brilliant new mathematical proof of something or other, arrived at during a miraculous late period of lucidity. But wait. Gwyneth says she wrote this new proof. Can she prove it? Can Jake prove he really loves her? Is ”proof” a control-freaky thing that’s preventing them from going with the rich spontaneous flow of life? Can the concept of proof be turned into any other dull metaphors?
We are invited to believe that Hopkins, Paltrow and Gyllenhaal all have, in their various ways, alpha-brains. They look to me like they couldn’t recite the three times table without smoke coming out of their ears. Paltrow does a kind of lip-biting anguished look that is possibly the result of trying to work out 20 minus 17 in her head. And it is particularly unnerving that her romantic interest is with Gyllenhaal, who here models a diluted version of the nerdy-vulnerable look that was his line before raising his game in Brokeback Mountain. Gwyneth and Jake — what a terrifying collision of sensitiveness! Any resulting children would be gold medallists in the Emoting Olympics.
John Madden (who directed Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love and Judi Dench in Mrs Brown) is a formidable professional who does his considerable best with the ropey material available to him. And, to be fair, this movie isn’t the first to make the hackneyed association of genius and mental instability, as if science or maths aren’t interesting enough on their own, or as if people with mental problems aren’t allowed to exist without also being geniuses.
There is something feeble in the way Proof simply isn’t up to explaining anything at all about this alleged proof. For all its faults, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind made an honest stab at explaining game theory, but Proof makes maths just a style accessory. It doesn’t add up. — Â