Ok, after the heaviness of the last post, I need to decompress a bit. I figure a quick flick review will do the trick.
Watched PROOF (on DVD)last night.
Starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love, the Talented Mr. Ripley, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, et al),
Jake Gyllenhaal (October Sky, the Day After Tomorrow, Jarhead, and the ever infamous Brokeback Mountain), and
Sir Anthony Hopkins (too many great films to list, but for a sampling Silence of the Lambs, the Mask of Zorro, Magic, the Elephant Man, Dracula, Nixon, and so on and so forth)
The story itself is rather simplistic. A famous mathematician, Robert (Hopkins), has died after many years of mental illness. His daughter Catherine (Paltrow) has cared for him for the last five. A young professor, Hal (Gyllenhaal), whom Robert tutored and mentored through Hal's Doctoral thesis, is looking through Robert's notebooks (all 109 of them) to see if he could find any breakthroughs in math that Robert might have been working on. (Robert was reputed to have influenced three different spheres of science with his work when he was in his 20's.) While not out-and-out stated, it is implied that Robert suffered from schizophrenia. What's also implied is that Catherine may also suffer from it. Hal confides in Catherine what he's searching for. Catherine shows him a notebook containing a 40 page mathematical proof that, if found to be sound, would once again radically change an area of math. After a brief argument involving Hal, Catherine, and Catherine's bitch sister Claire (played to malevolent excellence by Hope Davis), it's revealed that the proof was written, not by Robert, but by Catherine. Hal cannot accept this, as Catherine dropped out of college to take care of her father. The remainder of the movie deals with Hal trying to "prove" the proof, and Catherine trying to deal with Claire's mechanizations to get Catherine to move from Chicago to New York so Claire "can take care of you." In Catherine's mind (and not unrightly so), this actually means big sister has found a nice mental hospital to put Catherine away in and keep her out of embarrassing view.
The character interaction is honest. Hopkins is, as always, brilliant. While he is not in the majority of the movie, the scenes that he is in are HIS. Paltrow does an excellent job of holding her own against this cinematic juggernaught (she, also, is an Oscar winner, so is no slouch in the scene-control game). Gyllenhaal's character grows on you, like most of the characters he's portrayed in recent memory. And Hope Davis' Claire makes me want to come up with some creative forms of assassination.
PROOF is not a great film. I dubbed it "A Beautiful Life, part 2" as I watched the opening scenes. However, it does not overextend itself. It doesn't pretend to be something more than it is: a drama about the human interaction surrounding the death of a beloved, but very disturbed man. The geek in me wishes they'd spend more time discussing the math, but it's really irrelevant to the overall story. And while it doesn't have a definitive ending, it's not an unsatisfying conclusion. It's like working on a proof: sometimes you come to the wrong conclusion, and so you go back and rework things and figure out where you made your mistake and correct it.
Other than one superfluous love scene, this was a decent little movie that I recommend to folks who like drama with geek overtones. Three stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment