12A, 100 mins
A wan, bloodless Gwyneth Paltrow reclaims the role she played in the original stage version of Proof — Catherine is the daughter of a dead mathematics genius whose genetic legacy from her father may be his gift for calculus or his mental instability.
The brittle, difficult Catherine clearly has daddy issues. She’s in the habit of punctuating her self-enforced solitude with long chats with dead Dad — it’s a clumsy, stagey device, particularly when her father (a blustering Anthony Hopkins) returns from the dead to wish her a happy birthday. Catherine, naturally, is having a perfectly miserable birthday, moping on her own in a shapeless cardigan, swigging plonk from the bottle.
Catherine, it transpires, has more to worry about than whether she’s an algorithm short of the full equation. The relationship between Catherine and her suffocating sister (Hope Davis) crackles with animosity. But then again for the prickly Catherine most social interactions are equally hostile.
She finds herself warming, however, to one of her father’s former students (Jake Gyllenhaal, rather miscast) who has offered to scour the professor’s affairs for any last lucid flashes.
Advertisement
The cast list is impressive but there is too much about this formula that just doesn’t add up. One problem is that Catherine is such an unsympathetic character — she demands our pity with the grace of a stroppy teenager. It’s difficult to care whether she’s a maths nut or just a nut.
The real disappointment, however, is the fact that a film about genius is so creatively unadventurous. The problem of how to convey cinematically something as nebulous as a mathematical breakthrough is a sticky one, but surely there’s a more interesting way than hacking together a montage of mathematicians with unbrushed hair feverishly scribbling in notebooks. Even the deadly A Beautiful Mind permitted its maths genius a spot of impromptu graffiti. Ultimately, this film about exceptional minds is distinctly average.