Review: Proof

Has Gwyneth Paltrow's moment passed? I don’t personally wish her any ill will – she seems like an inoffensive enough woman, macrobiotic mania aside – but her stardom to me seems like an irretrievably 90s phenomena, like Friends, or Lollapalooza, or, well, the Weinstein-powered monster that used to be Miramax, the studio whose closet the latest Paltrow film, Proof, has been collecting dust in for quite awhile. And if there’s anything tangibly wrong with the film (beyond the fact that it takes a bundle of potentially devastating ideas and dulls them down to the potency of a glass of warm strawberry milk), it's that the dust shows. The moment that its various elements work to describe feels like a blurry time capsule of recent history, seeming variously like the product of ten different Oscar seasons uncomfortably muddled together.

It's also a Serious Film About Geniuses, the kind that our anthropomorphized friend Oscar is rumored to love, and it works the cliches of that genre to the hilt. But there's something curiously hollow here: Proof's brainiacs furrow their brows to the correct degree whilst scribbling furiously in composition books, but that's about all they've got when it comes to conveying the mania that makes them want to make a living solving math problems. It's genius without passion, which essentially makes it lifestyle porn for nerd fetishists.

We first see Paltrow's Catherine looking forlornly at the camera, dead-on and glassy-eyed, her pout less an actual human expression than something the actress might have picked up accidentally from her cat. She expertly swivels her head to the left in order to look forlornly at the television, which is sputtering late-night informercial mania, and then – with truly stunning precision – she turns back to look at the camera, even more forlornly, as if to say, “Tonight, I, Gwyneth Paltrow, will be doing my impersonation of Sad.” It’s such an interesting shot, but only because the real Gwyneth is there, hiding behind the eyes of the acting Gwyneth, and she wants us to know that she's not going anywhere.

What makes the decidedly non-chatty Cathy so glum? Her father (Anthony Hopkins), a genius mathematician who hit his peak around 23 and then spent the next forty years in slow, sad descent, is dead; forgetting this in her grief, she continues to carry on conversations with him anyway. She and he were abnormally close, Catherine having dropped out of her own math genius finishing school in order to move back home and babysit Daddy in his increasing dementia. Catherine is afraid of turning out like her father on almost every level imaginable, and yet she does pretty much everything she can to ensure the future holds exactly that. When we come opon her there on the sunporch with the TV, it's her 27th birthday. She'll have to bury her father, gauge the authenticity of another young, suspiciously attractive mathmetician's (Jake Gyllenhaal) advances, decide whether or not to surrender to her hyper-Type A sister (Hope Davis), and come to terms with her own talents and psychotic patterns before the week is out.

The film is clearly set up as a vehicle through which award ambitions hope to travel, but only Davis and Hopkins (both operating at about half-capacity) approach their roles with the kind of ease that warrants recognition. Paltrow is just a very surface oriented performer; everything we learn about the interior life of her character seems to start and stop on the skin. This kind of exterior-only performance style is something Paltrow perfected in the 90s, in films like Great Expectations or Sliding Doors, but it doesn't feel like enough here. Gwyneth Paltrow is not in the habit of letting anyone forget that there’s a patrician, oatmeal-colored, Oscar-winning vegan inside every character she plays. She doesn’t become Catherine, she just puts on her scowl and her clothes. When she spits out the limited math babble that the filmmakers are willing to get into, you can see the words on the page – only the most steadfast Gwyneth apologist would believe for a second that the woman before us understands 1/100th of what it means.

Hope Davis' Claire comes to town to micromange Catherine with potassium and jojoba. I think Davis is phenomenally talented, but in their scenes together, it feels like she and Paltrow are stumbling through an intermediate-level improv exercise. The second a little bit of Paltrow’s Madonna-esque “An American in Britain” affectation slips out, it becomes obvious that the real Gwynnie would be the one trying to sell the house and put a blanket over the loose-cannon sister. I thought back to Davis’ early star turn in Next Stop Wonderland and wondered if this would have been a better film if she had taken on the role of the sulky mathematician instead of that of the neatly-packaged shrew. Somehow I think I might have believed the math jargon if it were coming out of her lips.

Gyllenhaal is also good, if not great. Just as he managed to improve a lifeless Jennifer Aniston in Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl, his presence here works a kind of shock therapy on Paltrow. I certainly disagree with the seemingly pervailing opinion that he’s been miscast. His Hal is suppossed to be a middling scholar at best; he might be the best thing that ever happened to Catherine, or he might be an opportunist dick, and it's important that we're not really sure. If he didn't have an edge to him – if you didn't look at the guy and think, "Isn't he way, way too good looking to be a math geek?" –  then the questions that bubble up through his seduction of Catherine simply wouldn’t stick. These are the most interesting and powerful parts of the film, the ones that really seem to approach the kinds of abstract lines of thought that only hardcore academics really ever bother with, where theories about infinite numbers and other-mind skepticism and abstraction all seem to quite romantically bleed together. There are moments where it's suggested that math is something that needs to be "talked out", like psychotherapy, except without the fail safe of mood stabilizing drugs. My sense is that it's a totally inaccurate portrayal of what it's like to actually be a math genius, but it's these moments, as well as the ones where director John Madden concentrates on distilling the cool beauty of late-winter Chicago into swatches of blue and brushed metal, that are worth opening up and hiding in for long stretches. They save the film.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find it satisfying in some way. I’m generally interested in the questions it raises, about knowledge of the self and others, and the not-so-simple problem of fundamental uncertainty. And I think even Stanley Cavell might agree that we haven’t seen a film that pays this much lip service to the romantic implications of ordinary language philosophy since Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth.

But that makes it all the more frustrating when the teeth on these issues are sawed down as far as they are. Proof simply doesn't seem to want to break the skin. It's mostly an aesthetic problem, but then, Proof is a mostly aesthetic film, and stylewise, it's been spit-shined in all kinds of ways to distract attention from the depths it cannot reach. Amongst its offenses: it parcels out emotional information almost solely through physical gesture, and narrative information through exposition; it tries to speak to, for and about various kinds of women in a manner that strikes me as hopelessly clueless; it shellacks all of its loose ends into “award worthy” neatness; and, most grevious of all,  it tosses you around like a rag doll until you find yourself wiping tears that you never wanted, and are embarrassed to have, off your face. It’s the kind of film that I'll usually run from, if by chance I see it coming, so that I don't find myself running out of it and running to the bathroom so that I can re-apply my mascara before anyone notices that I fell victim to its oppressive score.

Sergei Eisenstein must have worried about what would happen if the jump cut fell into the hands of bourgeoisie, and it turns out he had every reason to be concerned. Madden is fond of oppressive close ups that find their lack of resolution in choppily edited montages, the kind that were once the provence of propaganda for the proletariat. Proof is some kind of propaganda, but it's hardly the stuff revolutions were built on. Quite the opposite: it feels like a Pottery Barn catalogue in motion, a comprehensive lifestyle laid out for consumption. You came in on the tease of love, death, truth and math; you walked off with nothing but a blonde in a tasteful sweater, sulkily slumped on rattan.