Of Madmen, Movie Stars And Math

By RICHARD CORLISS

The charisma that a lot of contemporary actors have is the threat of madness. A cockeyed glint, a sudden shout, a shift of body weight--these tricks keep you watching, like a doting pathologist, to catch the moment an actor goes edifyingly nuts. It's sexy, this promise to grab viewers and lead them down a treacherous path. It's also the surest route to an Oscar.

Gwyneth Paltrow is different. She has, in her genes, the supra-domestic glamour of the movie star her actress mother, Blythe Danner, should have been. The cultivated voice and confident posture suggest an easy regality. Her Oscar, for Shakespeare in Love, was a throwback: a reward for reminding Hollywood what star quality used to be.

So casting her as Catherine in Proof instantly alters the vectors of David Auburn's Pulitzer prizewinning play. A young woman whose genius father went mad is suspected of inheriting not his gift but his curse. The actresses who played her on Broadway--Mary-Louise Parker, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anne Heche--radiate an otherworldly, almost Martian eccentricity. The question with them was, How can you believe Catherine when she says she wrote a pioneering mathematical equation? With Paltrow the question is, How can you not? Her reading doesn't subvert the play's problem; it's just a more elegant way of reaching the solution.

Director John Madden is generous and fair to all but one of the lead actors. As Catherine's father, Anthony Hopkins gets at the heartbreaking semblance of clarity in a great mind gone astray. Jake Gyllenhaal, as a student who beds Catherine, has the cagey grace to make us both fond and suspicious of him. Hope Davis is Catherine's businesslike sister; it's a cold hand, stacked against her, in a movie that exalts intuition, that sees higher mathematics as no less an art than Beethoven's, and commerce as a craft no subtler than accounting.

Proof is on the side of the lost, blessed souls. Paltrow, as alluring and reassuring as ever, emphasizes the blessedness in the isolation of genius, giving a new dimension to a complex role. New, true and thrilling--she is the Catherine that Proof was waiting for. --By Richard Corliss