Box-Office Suicide But One of the Best Films of the Year

Proof is an uncommonly intelligent film, one of the best you'll never see precisely because it doesn't pander to the weekend crowd. This is a film with rich dialogue, plot twists that keep the story fresh, and awesome performances. It's also a film that may be too intelligent for the average viewer, zig-zagging back and forth between the subjective and the objective, with nonlinear structure that doesn't employ stylistic cues to alert the audience that the tale is being told out of sync. You have to pay close attention to follow what's going on. But for those who do, this is a rewarding film.

Catherine (Gwynneth Paltrow) is a woman on the edge of a breakdown. Her father, Robert (Anthony Hopkins) has recently died. Though he was a mathematical genius, he was also going mad, requiring Catherine to give up her own life to take care of him. Now, with her long ordeal over, she worries that his mental illness may become hers.

In the aftermath of her father's death, Catherine finds herself caught between two competing voices. Her sister, Claire (Hope Davis), has flown in from New York. Claire wants Catherine to leave Chicago and come live with her, in part because she wants Catherine to start a new life, in part because she has sold the house out from underneath her, and in part because she thinks that Catherine may be as crazy as dear old dad.

Then there's Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a nerdy mathematician who looked to Robert as his doctoral advisor. Hal knows what Robert became, in the sunset of his life, but he holds to the hope that a man who rewrote the book - not once but twice - might have written something down in the 100+ notebooks he left behind, something that might change the world yet again.

Both Claire and Hal care a lot about Catherine, but each has obvious reasons to fake it, too - enough to make edgy Catherine that much more paranoid about the lifelines they offer. Add to that the flashbacks and flashpresents of a father who haunts her waking and sleeping life, and you've got a first-rate psychodrama. Proof is a film every bit as much about relationships as plot points, even when those plot points come at right angles to Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind.

The film gets its name from the mathematical process of not only solving a problem but validating the solution. Anybody can come up with an answer but it takes a "proof" to make it ore than a guess. Every character in this film is doing the math, each in his or her own way, and each has moments of madness along the way.

This is a remarkable film. Whether you agree will depend on your ability to enjoy character-driven stories about people engaged in existential crises. It will also depend on your attention span. It is not a film that panders to the weekend crowd. Its scenes are slow and deliberate, its conflicts primarily internal. The overarching metaphor is math. When was the last time you saw a giant bill-board-sized marquee for math?

If, on the other hand, you find yourself routinely insulted by the predictable, derivative, dumbed-down plots that keep getting turned into hundred-million-dollar crap, this film may be the break you were looking for. The dialogue and performances are superb. Paltrow is at her quirky best. Gylenhaal is at his most believable. Hope Davis is gloriously annoying. And the great Sir Anthony Hopkins is wonderful in the way he personifies both intelligence and a Reaganesque sense of being lost and out of touch. For the right crowd, this is a film that deserves to be seen.