As with many film adaptations of stage successes, David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play about mathematics and madness, Proof, loses something in its translation to celluloid. Auburn’s drama about a reclusive young woman mourning the recent death of her father, a once-brilliant mathematician who began to succumb to mental illness at 27 (her age), is a mystery of sorts, one that explores the thin line that exists between sanity and genius. The brittle edge in Mary-Louise Parker’s onstage performance beautifully fueled this mystery – has the troubled Catherine inherited her father’s rare gift for theorems and proofs, or is she simply going nuts as he did? In the film version of Proof, however, Paltrow’s earnest, hand-wringing performance as Catherine drains the blood from this mystery. Because the character’s morose behavior in the film appears to stem from fear rather than some genetically wired impulse, you never really consider the possibility that Catherine may be descending into an inevitable hereditary madness. And without the measure of self-deprecating levity that Parker brought to the role, Paltrow’s Catherine often comes off as a sourpuss throwing her own pity party. That’s not to say that her turn in Proof is without merit – it’s probably the rawest, most naked performance she’s ever given onscreen – but the direction in which it takes things diminishes the film’s overall potential. Paltrow’s best scenes are the poignant ones she shares with Hopkins in the role of Catherine’s dead father, both in flashbacks and in real time. (The film’s temporal shifts and imagined conversations require you to pay close attention, or else you might be confused about when a particular scene is taking place.) Auburn and Rebecca Miller’s adaptation of his play also emphasizes the romantic relationship between Catherine and Hal (Gyllenhaal), the graduate student who discovers the groundbreaking proof in the deceased professor’s papers that sets the plot in motion. While they undeniably make for an attractive pair, who knew that math geeks could have such beautiful features and toned bodies? Stereotypically speaking, that may be the biggest mystery in Proof.
This article appears in October 7 • 2005.
