Review

Review Date: 25-September-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Junk

Proof (2005)

Gwyneth Paltrow can mope better than any actress I know, but there are times when this talent isn't a plus. Take "Hard Eight," for example, which showcases Paul Thomas Anderson's budding brilliance as a filmmaker but stumbles because Paltrow's character is so annoying. Or take "Proof," for another example, in which her droopiness seems both annoying and unnatural when combined with the handicaps of poor writing and direction.

"Proof" may have played well on the London stage (with Paltrow in the lead and director John Madden at the helm), but in movie form it's a series of stilted dialogues between unconvincing characters. The story revolves around a 27-year-old woman named Catherine who has spent the last several years taking care of her father, a celebrated but mentally ill mathematician (Anthony Hopkins). His death has just released her from this challenging task, but her future is frighteningly uncertain. (Hence the moping.) She dropped out of college so she has no career, and she lacks friends and support beyond a sister she detests (Hope Davis). On top of that, she worries that she inherited her dad's insanity as well as his genius, which exacerbates her isolation and turns her next step into a question mark.

Catherine's reclusiveness and depression aren't enough to scare off hot guys, however, at least not a young lecturer at the university who studied under her father (Jake Gyllenhaal, the rare actor in his twenties who could pull off beefcake egghead). This fellow genially hits on Catherine the night before the funeral and pursues her with an ardor stemming from both his head and his crotch: he wants to ransack the old man's notebooks for revelations while cracking open the mystery of his daughter. Gyllenhaal is the only remotely appealing person in the mix, but I didn't believe in him for a second. The answer to someone's life crisis never appears so readily or with so much incentive to strive for more, and if it did, it wouldn't spell good drama.

And that's the problem: this isn't good drama. Paltrow and co-writers David Auburn and Rebecca Miller just don't make Catherine or her situation interesting. She's not unstable, clever, or sweet enough to engender concern for her future, and the significance of her story as presented is unclear. (Particularly as the movie suffers from awkward movements through time.) Just when you decide that "Proof" is about Catherine's struggle to break out of the shell into which her father's illness has placed her, it veers off into a tease about a marvelous mathematical discovery and whether she should allow herself to be locked away. If Gyllenhaal is set up as the Answer in the first half of the picture, Davis is contrived to be his opposite in the second, a shallow nitwit who can't understand her sister's specialness (join the club) and tries to smother it instead of urging it to fly. Who the hell are these people and what are they trying to prove? The movie never gives us the answer.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.