Film Review

Gwyneth is back! After marriage, motherhood, and a few really naff movies (View from the Top?!) Gwyneth finally pulls it together. Playing Catherine, the daughter of a Math wizard (Anthony Hopkins), whose life was haunted by his descent into madness, her performance is an emotional one: fear, rage, depression, lostness are the ingredients she is working with--this is not a happy film, although it's conclusions point towards the positive. The film is essentially about madness--is it inherited? is it inevitable? and Catherine, who is caught between the pull of both ideas.

Catherine has nursed her father through the last year's of his life and worries that she too has the afflictions of her father. Like him, she has tendencies towards genius in the math department and instability in the emotional. Proof is a mathematical term used by serious mathematicians to demonstrate that their theories are correct. The understory here is about the solving of impossible mathematical problems (something about which I know nothing!) and whether in the midst of psychosis her father could have solved a major mathematical problem. But as I said, madness is the real story here. Paltrow visited here once before in Sylvia, an overlooked film in my opinion, and another one that deals with what happens when people lose themselves in psychosis.

These films are just a couple of examples of cinematic explorations of the interplay between context and biology--they seem to point to larger cultural explorations on the nature of illness, the meaning of pain, and the shaping of indentity. In a remarkable book, Illness and Postmodern Culture, David Morris speaks about pain having "historical, psychological, and cultural dimensions." It was the cultural dimension of illness and pain that struck me. I have had a number of people in my circle of relationships have brain issues (tumours and the like), over the past couple of years--none of them fatal, but all of them traumatising and seemingly random--it seems to be an issue of our time. I don't think it is just that I am older---maybe it's all the electronic equipment we use--who knows? It is just interesting how different medical issues seem to emerge at different times. It seems that how we think about reality, about pain, about nature versus nurture, affects what we think and feel about our ailments.

Proof doesn't really give answers to the questions it raises, well it does, but in a very roundabout way and this may not satisfy all audiences--but sometimes rasing the issues is as important as answering the fully. The math subtext is also given a bit of a twist, a 'postmodern sheen'--"math isn't jazz" is an early critique of Catherines own unorthodox explorations into math--but as we learn later in the film--sometimes it is--and the kind of math Catherine engages in produces 'proofs'--which are hip, cool and new. Like all fields of study, math it seems, is undergoing its own transformation into something even 21st century hipsters can embrace--and I don't mean that facetiously. Proof began life as a Pulitzer winning play and the movie version bears many of the same hallmarks which make it feel a bit cramped at times--but for me, it was the ideas behind the story and the way they are so effectivley brought to the screen that made it work for me.