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Critics Consensus: Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins give exceptional performances in a film that intelligently tackles the territory between madness and genius.
Critic Consensus: Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins give exceptional performances in a film that intelligently tackles the territory between madness and genius.
All Critics (144) | Top Critics (39) | Fresh (90) | Rotten (54) | DVD (7)
Madden stages the action with a minimum of imagination and gets a career-worst performance out of Davis in a key role, but the material still sputters to life on the strength of the writing and Paltrow's commitment to the part.
Sadly, the impact of the clever parallelogram of emotional and philosophical concerns in Auburn and Rebecca Miller's screenplay is deadened by the director's overly literal -- mechanical -- cinematic interpretation.
Madden does a competent job transferring the film from stage to screen.
Few movies regard the psyche with such sober discernment.
The result, like so many stout travellers from stage to screen, is respectable. Stolidly, bloodlessly, yawningly respectable.
Miscast yet marvelous, Paltrow and the rest of the cast hold you to the movie, even when you intuitively sense something is lacking.
It's that breed of verbal swordplay that so impresses on stage while seeming so redundant and brittle on screen.
... Proof seems like no more than a fraction of a cinematic experience, a string of emotional calculations that fails to provide a satisfying solution.
Proof is a smart film, but it tries too hard. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and the pathos becomes a bit much because there is little to balance it out.
A limp, and utterly pointless melodrama that's never as intelligent as it thinks.
Timid staging faithful adaptation = no cinema
offers a convincing demonstration of the theorem that good writing and sensitive performances can equal an engaging and nuanced piece of cinema.
Paltrow shimmers and shines in this look at real inheritance, what the DNA leaves, as Pop (Hopkins, dynamite) is a math genius who, ummm, loses track, shall we say. Will the daughter follow in Pop's enormous footsteps ... in each and every way? Tension aplenty with a great supporting cast. Pretty damn good if you ask me.
Super Reviewer
The daughter of a brilliant mathematician must convince her new beau and her domineering sister that she wrote an important mathematical document. We don't care about the proof, the film's main source of conflict; director John Madden knows few in the audience are smart enough to care about theoretical math and physics. So what's left? Proof has to compel us with the interpersonal drama Catherine's relationship with her dead father and her sister and boyfriend who grow to doubt her sanity. But from very early on, we know there's no reason to doubt Catherine, so we're left waiting for the film to catch up to the audience, and thus the film loses its reason to compel us to care about these characters. Gwyneth Paltrow, who conjures her Sylvia character in her depressive moments, occasionally gives us reason to pay attention to Catherine's struggles, but especially when she raises her voice, Catherine, in Paltrow's hands, comes off as annoyingly disinterested and unengaged with manic bouts of petulance. It's hard to like Paltrow, and it's even harder to be interested in Catherine. Overall, I found Proof to be structurally flawed, and the film's star certainly didn't shine.
I cried when Jake Gyllenhaal didn't believe that Gwyneth Paltrow wrote the proof. So sue me. It was sad.I love that you don't know where this movie is going until it gets there. I turned cold when Gwyneth Paltrow read out Anthony Hopkins' "proof."
This film has so much going for it. Gwyneth Paltrow plays the lead role, Anthony Hopkins is a minor, but important, supporting character, and the premise has tons of potential. This film wants so bad to be "A Beautiful Mind", but it has some serious problems with the direction its plot moves. Everything about the story begs for less Jake Gyllenhaal, who wasn't bad, and Hope Davis, who was awful every time she was on screen. Their characters are given far too much focus. Paltrow's character, the ostensibly interesting, complex protagonist, is still a mystery to the viewer by the end of the film. The story begs to go in one direction but the plot strays away. It's not a *bad* film, but it's certainly not a good one. I didn't love "A Beautful Mind", but at least that film had a good idea of how this type of story needs to be told.
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