People who love math are like Jehovah’s witnesses – they’ll do anything to convert you. Every morning they pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and math (and not necessarily in that order). They make outlandish arguments in favor of math.
Why, if it wasn’t for math, you and your roommates would have no idea how many slices each person gets when you order Domino’s.
What can you possibly say to that?
So you load up on French classes, avoid the Math Building like the restroom at R.J. Bentley’s and try to live a cotangent-free lifestyle. But math is like a zombie – every time you bury it, that hand bursts out of the cemetery ground.
Even Hollywood is starting to drink the math Kool-Aid. The odd thing is, mathematics and the cinema seem to go together like numerators and denominators.
First Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson figured out how to get four gallons of water from five and three-gallon jugs in Die Hard With a Vengeance (for the record, I still don’t understand how they did it). Then, Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind each snagged a few little golden guys.
And now Proof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play brought to the silver screen by director John Madden (think John “Shakespeare in Love” Madden, not John “Boom! Tough actin’ Tinactin” Madden), could be the movie that makes you look forward to Monday morning’s Statistics class.
Gwyneth Paltrow reprises the role of Catherine (a role she played on-stage in London’s West End), a daughter coping with the recent death of her mathematically brilliant but mentally unbalanced father, Robert (Sir Anthony Hopkins, Red Dragon). The film’s conflict stems from Catherine’s inheritance: her father’s genius, but also his insanity.
In a series of flashbacks, we see how Catherine put her life on hold for the better part of five years so she could tend to her father, who seemed to suffer from a combination of Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.
When her father does kick the bucket, not only does she have grief and her own questionable health to worry about, but her overbearing Manhattanite sister, Claire (Hope Davis, American Splendor), and the hunky math geek, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko), hassle her as well.
Proof has no convenient, dark-clad bad guy. Both Claire and Hal beautifully demonstrate that the best of intentions don’t always yield the best of results. Claire, recently engaged, advocates a change of scenery for her younger sis, in hopes that moving from the mausoleum that is their father’s house in Chicago to a cute little apartment in New York will get her sickly sibling to smile, find a man and start exchanging vegetarian chili recipes.
Hal, a disciple of Robert’s, keeps bothering Catherine to look through her dad’s study in hopes that, during the years his dementia worsened, he was still able to come up with any salvageable work or theories.
Exchanges between Paltrow’s Catherine and Gyllenhaal’s dweeby Hal are among the film’s best, loaded with wit, drama and awkward romance (though the dialogue between other characters is stellar as well, as is usually the case when plays are optioned into movies).
At times, the character of Hal – an Abercrombie-looking nerd who teaches 10-year-olds hockey and is the drummer in a math band – can be a bit hard to swallow. Gyllenhaal, to his credit, pulls off the balancing act with unusual aplomb for an actor his age.
Hopkins and Paltrow are fabulous too. Paltrow is once again in full moping mode a la The Royal Tenenbaums, but bubbles to life at just the right moments. Hopkins is in the business of overwhelming with his role; his character simultaneously seems strong and heartbreakingly frail.
Props go to Madden and playwright/screenwriter David Auburn for never compromising when adapting this smart, droll work to the big screen. Though there is plenty of high drama along with some mention of sines and cosines, Proof never feels like homework.
Contact reporter Patrick Gavin at gavindbk@gmail.com
