Directed by: John Madden
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal, & Hope Davis
Runtime: 99 min
Rating: PG-13
Trailer

You would assume that when adapting a stage play for the screen the filmmaker would be focused on opening up the setting to utilize all the possibilities the film world allows. This by no means is the only prerequisite when adapting a play to the screen, but when it’s done badly, it’s an overbearing and artificial distraction that hinders the appreciation of the story being told. That got me thinking about two films in particular that I adore, Deathtrap and Death and the Maiden, both of which used their restrictive locales – a country mansion and a small seaside cottage – to maximum effect, creating a valuable sense of claustrophobia that was conducive to their particular story. This is rare though, as most play adaptations come off as boring filmed recreations of Masterpiece Theatre, or more likely, the story is expanded to such great lengths that the characters seem to move around like pawns on chess board.

Thankfully, the film adaptation of Proof, based on David Auburn’s play about a young woman’s fear of inheriting her father’s debilitating mental illness, manages to straddle the fine line between utilizing the play’s restrictive setting as a means of escalating character interactions, while allowing it to engage in a little bit of film trickery. Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, a young university math student, celebrating her birthday with her imaginary father, Robert (Anthony Hopkins), a genius mathematician who died a day earlier. She is plagued by fears of whether or not she will inherit the disease that inflicted her father’s mental capability. Being the only daughter to stay with her father throughout the last months of his life, Catherine abandoned her work as a student and is shattered to experience her father’s losing battle with senility and coherence. Once her older sister, Claire, played with ruthless condescension by indie favourite Hope Davis, arrives, Catherine is pressured into moving to New York so she may be looked after by Claire and top notch psychiatrists. Robert’s current math student, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), gums up the proceedings with a relentless desire to sift through thousands of pages of old notebooks in the hopes of finding proof of Robert’s genius, but to Catherine, Hal’s intrusion is seen as nothing more than a desperate attempt to pass off her father’s work as his own. This all culminates in an interesting mystery involving a lost math proof her father may or may not have worked on during the last couple of months of his life, suggesting that he may have been getting better.

Madden stages the bulk of the action in Catherine’s house, with occasional flashbacks to crucial moments of Catherine and Robert’s relationship – which fluctuated between days of lucidity and relapse. In the beginning however – and this is where I was worried – Madden allows interaction between Catherine and her father as a way of tricking the audience into believing that Catherine and Robert actually exist in the same time and space, even after it’s revealed that her dad had already died the night before. However, this conceit is quickly, and rightly, abandoned, because the last thing anyone wants is an interpretation of mental instability à la A Beautiful Mind. Of course there are problems with Proof, one of which concerns surrounding characters never really given any sort humanity that we can relate to. It’s almost like watching the aforementioned A Beautiful Mind without the rock-like stability of the Jennifer Connelly character. Instead, we’re relegated to objectively watching the characters while constantly reinterpreting Catherine’s decisions and actions as psychotic hysterics or outbursts of a confused and damaged soul. Minor problems, however, don’t detract from a well written and consistently gripping film.

Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006