Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that the movie includes discussion of suicide and insanity. With the focus on conflicts within a family -- between father and daughter, and between two sisters -- the film includes several tense scenes, arguments, and tearful recriminations. It also features some cursing, a brief and gently rendered love scene, and references to drugs (medical treatments as well as illicit drugs). Characters smoke and drink.
Families can discuss the relationships among family members -- two sisters and, in flashbacks, father and daughter. How do these relationships affect one another, as the sisters compete for the father's memory? You might also consider the movie's questions about insanity and brilliance: how are these subjective states connected or different, and also determined by social as well as medical standards?
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
In the sometimes insightful, sometimes banal PROOF, Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) worries that she might be insane. Her question begins with her father, renowned and brilliant mathematician Robert (Anthony Hopkins), recently deceased and for a long time before that, "crazy."
That's Robert's word for it, and he spends the first few minutes of the film appearing to Catherine and discussing definitions of insanity. "Crazy people," he argues, can't be aware that they are crazy, they can't even ask whether they are crazy because they are so immersed in the minutiae that marks their madness, their obsessions with daily details, paranoid fantasies, or the architecture of their subjective, fabricated worlds. Catherine is skeptical of this assertion: after all, her father is crazy, and yet here he is, able to ask the question of himself. Right, he agrees, without an answer. Except that, as he admits, he's also dead.
Based on David Auburn's long-running play (on Broadway and on London's West End, among other venues), John Madden's movie begins with Catherine's efforts to deal with her father's funeral and clean up his house. This difficult task follows her efforts to keep him together over years of madness. While Catherine's sister Claire (Hope Davis) -- who might best be described as "chipper" -- has moved to New York City, married, and had a career, she stayed behind, within their father's sphere, tending to him, worrying about him, and keeping her own ambitions at bay. She completed some university classes, showing her own mathematical aptitude and a little lack of focus, enough to frighten her and Claire into thinking that Catherine might have inherited her father's brilliance and also his tendency to insanity.
And so PROOF poses questions of trust and doubt, grief and guilt, ambition and selfishness, as well as the sisters' competition and resentment. Catherine is also presently dealing with her father's ex-student, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), an aspiring mathematician and drummer in a local band, who comes by to sort through Robert's papers, hoping, perhaps, to find a lost instance of genius, something recorded during a rare lucid moment, a last sign that his madness was not utter and all-consuming, even as it may have seemed that way.
The film's central, concrete problem is the revelation of a proof, not quite elegant but exceptional and potentially math-world-changing (again), hidden away inside a locked drawer in Robert's home office. Flashbacks reveal that he and Catherine spent some time working on a problem together, separately, but at the same time, each writing out pages of proof, working late into nights and bent over desks and tables in deep concentration. As their handwriting is similar, it's unclear whether the newly discovered proof is Robert's or Catherine's. She claims it is hers, but neither Hal nor Claire quite believes it. And so the film presents a knot of questions, twisted up inside a knot of delicate performances and a fragmented narrative.
Families who like this movie might also enjoy Sylvia (in which Paltrow plays the suicidal British poet Sylvia Plath), Crimes of the Heart (another play about parent-child difficulties turned into a movie), and The Madness of King George (1994).
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentSome conversation about sex, a brief, sweetly imaged sex scene. |
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ViolenceDiscussion of suicide. |
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LanguageSome cursing, including f-word. |
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Social BehaviorCharacters wrestle with difficult issues (how to determine insanity and sanity), but all mean well. |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSome drinking and smoking (at a post-funeral party attended by academics), some discussion of drugs (prescribed and illicit). |
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