John Madden films David Auburn’s play with care and a strong cast, and Gwyneth Paltrow is as good here as she has been anywhere. But the camera rarely leaves the porch, the romance never convinces, and the proof at the centre stays a blank.
Catherine Llewellyn has been nursing her father, Robert, a mathematician whose mind went before his body did. Now he has died. She has done no work of her own, and she is afraid she has inherited his illness as well as his gift. John Madden’s film of David Auburn’s play, adapted by Auburn and Rebecca Miller, asks one question across its 100 minutes: when a remarkable proof turns up in a locked drawer, who wrote it? It is a good question, well acted and handsomely staged. It is also, from first scene to last, a play that has been let out into the garden and asked not to go far.
Paltrow is the film’s spine. Her Catherine is sleepless, unwashed and quick to wound, and she carries the film on a face that keeps checking itself for faults. In the first scene she sits on the sofa at four in the morning and argues with her father about whether knowing he is dead counts as being sane. Hopkins pours cheap champagne and asks whether she has eaten. We were caught off guard: when he says the plain thing about his own death, we felt the loss arrive before the film had told us anything about either of them.
Hopkins plays Robert mostly in flashback, rumpled, fond and fast, and he declines the invitation to do madness as a turn. The illness shows as a man slightly too pleased with his own cleverness, which is how it would look to a daughter. Hope Davis is the other reason to watch. Her Claire is a decent woman who has mistaken competence for love, and the two sisters in the kitchen, each certain the other is the one who cannot cope, give the film its best sustained scenes. Davis is better than the part, which Auburn and Miller write as the villain until they remember she is not one.
Gyllenhaal is the weak corner. Hal is likeable and a little blank; the script gives him a band, a crush and a suspicion, and the romance with Catherine arrives on schedule after the funeral. We did not believe a minute of it, and we grew impatient waiting for the film to notice. That matters, because the second half, which we will not describe, turns on whether Hal trusts her, and we had no stake in what Hal thought about anything.
Alwin H. Küchler shoots the house in flat grey autumn light, so a kitchen at noon looks like a kitchen at dusk, and keeps the flashbacks a shade warmer so we always know which year we are in. Alice Normington stacks Robert’s study with notebooks and leaves the rest of the house looking as if nobody has bought anything for a decade. Jill Taylor puts Catherine in her father’s cardigans and Claire in clothes that have been ironed. Stephen Warbeck’s score is piano and strings, held back, and at its best when it stops. Mick Audsley cuts between present and past cleanly, perhaps too cleanly: the flashbacks keep arriving to settle things we were about to work out for ourselves, and the film is less tense each time.
The proof itself is never shown and barely described. This is sensible, since nobody on a sofa could check it, and it also means the object everyone is fighting over is a blank page. We take Hal’s word that it is important the way we take a briefcase in a thriller, and the film wants a great deal more from it than that. Madden, who made Shakespeare in Love, knows how to open a play up, and the few times he does so here, a funeral, a party, a lecture hall, the film breathes. Then it goes back inside and sits down on the porch.
It is worth an evening for Paltrow and Davis, in a quiet room, with no expectation of a mystery solved by cleverness. The film answers the question about the proof. The question about Catherine it leaves open, which is the right way round.
