Reviewed by Jacob Powell

Proof. The Evidence? The facts attesting to the truth? The “proof” referred to in John Madden’s latest offering is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

“An operation serving to test or check the correctness of an arithmetical calculation.”

Mathematics was never my strongpoint – maybe that’s to blame – but I found the Proof somewhat unconvincing.


The film was adapted from David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning play of the same name. Proof, in its previous incarnation, was a successful stage production and had a stint in London’s fashionable West End. Gwyneth Paltrow, swelling the ranks of young Hollywood wannabe thespians, took the leading role of Catherine in this stage version, which played to good reviews, before she reprised it for the big screen.

Not having seen the play I am unsure how rigidly the film follows its predecessor in terms of plotline. The story, in and of itself, seems like fairly interesting material. A daughter’s struggle with the possibility of succumbing to the same mental demise she has just nursed her late, genius father through. The long absent, patronising sister who returns much too late to ‘pick up the pieces’. The pretty, young scholar enthralled by Catherine’s father’s work... including her.

Pardon? That’s right, why let something like the plot get in the way of the ubiquitous, and ever necessary, love story. Come on, there are two pretty people on show here – they better get up to something, right?! Paltrow plays the haunted soul well but for a character that has obviously displayed an awful amount of internal strength in the back-story, Catherine seems just a little too vulnerable and dependent when Jake Gyllenhaal’s Hal comes a knocking. The film’s focus sadly splits, unevenly, between her struggle with impending madness/genius and her struggle with Hal, his motives for being around, and her feelings for him. Like I said, at least they are pretty.

Is Proof a poor man’s alternative to A Beautiful Mind? You bet. Bypassing the meat of the story Madden (Shakespeare in Love, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) takes the same basic feel and subject matter – though from a different perspective – and reduces it to a clichéd film-by-numbers that puts ticks in all the right boxes but comes off looking like a cheap imitation.

I hadn’t been in the cinema 10 minutes and I felt like I was experiencing continuous déjà vous. It was like I was hearing each line moments before it was delivered. Everything about this production felt a little staged. The secondary characters were flat, uniform, and set to do an obvious job. Eventually I was so disengaged that I starting consciously picking out the director and cinematographer tricks – not that they took much picking. There were the erratic fast cuts with a ‘loose’ camera portraying Catherine’s confused state of mind, the reciprocation of exact dialogue to promote that cutesy ‘you can trust me’ feeling, and so on.

I don’t know. Maybe Madden should stick to the comedy thing. I enjoyed Shakespeare in Love. It knew what it was about – a few clever laughs and some light romance. Proof, however, seems stuck in some kind of theatrical identity crisis, not knowing how best to please its likely audience. For me it just didn’t add up.