FilmFemme

I’ve been meaning to see Proof for a while because way back in the day I saw the play on Broadway (starring Jennifer Jason Leigh) and I remember liking it.  Of course I could have been blinded by the glamour of seeing a play/celebrity on Broadway since I was like 17 at the time.  Anyway.

Anthony Hopkins is a superfamous mathematician who just died of an aneurysm, though he had been battling severe mental illness (they don’t give the DSM-IVTR code, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it was schizophrenia) for the last 5 years.  Gwyneth Paltrow is his youngest daughter who is also into math but dropped out of school to take care of her dad when his illness got worse.  Now he’s dead and she’s worried that she is going crazy and to top it all off, Jake Gyllenhaal is in her house (he’s a former student of her dad’s) going through her dad’s old stuff and totally trying to get with her!

Long story short, they have sex (at the wake), she likes him and gives him a key to her dad’s desk where he finds a crazy PROOF (the title) that is so awesome and revolutionary and Gwenny says she did it, but her bitchy sister (Hope Davis!) and Jake don’t believe she could have.  So she goes a little crazy.  But then Jake goes through the proof with all his math-y buddies and decides that she probably did write it, but it’s too late because Hope is taking Gwen to NYC so she can ‘look after her’ (in case she goes crazy).  But then she decides not to go and her and Jake are like in love.  And she’s a genius.  But still really mopey and whiny and annoying.

After watching this tepid and morose adaptation, I think that some plays (maybe contemporary plays?) don’t translate that well to the big screen.  Let me pretend to be insightful for a moment and say that a playwright (why the fuck is playwright spelled that way, btw?) writes a play to performed on stage.  A good playwright, anyway, writes a play to be performed on stage (not because they can’t get a screenplay produced) because it is a totally different writing, acting, viewing experience.  It’s live, it’s small, it’s intimate, it’s palpable in a way that a movie is not.  The problem is that, though this film dealt really well with the story and time shifts and was well done, well edited, well acted, the physical spaces were just so big that they swallowed up the story.  It’s a story about Catherine (Gwen) and Hal (Jake) and trust and family and commitment and math is just like a unique backdrop.  But when you take the story out into the quad at the University of Chicago and into Marshall Fields on Michigan Avenue, it just really loses its charm.  Also, as mentioned before, Paltrow plays Catherine really whiny and even though she kind of gets shit on by life (except for the part where she looks like Gwyneth Paltrow AND is a super math genius), I mostly wanted to hit her and tell her snap out of it.

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