GetOut Magazine

‘Proof’ gives no division between sanity, madness
B By CRAIG OUTHIER
GET OUT

Sanity is such a vague, slippery concept that anyone who tries to grip it with both hands is liable to go bughouse themselves. So it goes in John Madden's “Proof,” an elegant, engrossing puzzle of motivations and sympathies that keeps you guessing until the final piece slides into place.

Reprising the role she created onstage in London's West End, Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, the thorny twentysomething daughter of a prominent mathematician, Robert (Anthony Hopkins), who has recently died after decades of struggling with mental illness. Catherine, who dropped out of school to nurse her father, inherited some of his mathematical brilliance. Genetically speaking, this is hardly great news: She worries that she may have inherited some of his madness, too.

Rather than the shattered, identity-starved literary heroine Paltrow played in “Sylvia," Catherine is something more of a grump, a brooder who finds herself constitutionally incapable of processing trivia and day-to-day kibble. In the opening shot, we find her whiling away a rainy night in front of the TV, wearing a look of sheer disgust as an electronic parade of Bowflex commercials and talk-show patter dances in her eyes.

As written by David Auburn (who co-adapted his own, Pulitzer Prize-winning play), Catherine is a reactive figure; consequently, her personality is most dynamically revealed to us through her testy reactions to two other people: Older sister Claire (Hope Davis), a bubbly control freak who immediately puts Catherine on edge, and Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a friendly research assistant of her father's whom Catherine initially suspects of opportunistic motives.

In taking stock of Robert's possessions, a document is found, a potentially groundbreaking mathematical proof that looks to be in her father's handwriting but that Catherine claims to have authored herself.
Claire is skeptical, and soon even Catherine — who is understandably leery of her own genius — doesn't seem so certain. The proof holds the key to several dramas within the story (Catherine's sanity, her romantic confidence in Hal, her loyalty to her father) and Madden (here reteaming with his “Shakespeare in Love” leading lady) skillfully uses flashbacks and fragment perspectives to conjure an atmosphere of artful uncertainty.

Davis (“Next Stop, Wonderland”) nearly rides off with the movie as Claire, a compulsive shopper and checklist-checker who emerges as an insidiously vile creature, possibly more disturbed than Catherine herself. To borrow some of the story's canny mathematical logic, no one can prove she's crazy, but she's definitely not sane.