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"Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."--Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

I am intrigued by our culture's incessant desire to appear on television. Anymore when I watch a baseball game, I'm distracted by some bozo behind home plate waving to the camera while he talks on a cell phone. This desire is so strong that the poor folk who are arrested on "C.O.P.S." actually sign over the right to have their crimes exposed to the entire country. I suspect that part of it has to do with Walker Percy's idea of "certification"--that somehow seeing ourselves or our neighborhood or our home town on a movie or tv screen changes our idea of ourselves. We're no longer anyone. We're someone.

So, Hyde Parkers in particular will want to set aside some time to see the new movie Proof. It stars Gwenyth Paltrow as a young woman wrestling with the demons of mathematics and insanity. But it also prominently features the Hyde Park neighborhood, as exterior shots were taken on 48th Street, the Univ. of Chicago campus, and out at the beloved Point. Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) has done an impressive job of getting the locations right. When someone's driving from Evanston to 48th Street, she actually gets off at the 47th St. exit. No driving north on Lake Shore Drive, veering off into the middle of McCormick Place, and suddenly arriving at the Drake Hotel, as one Julia Roberts movie famously shows. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if the beautiful shots of Gwenyth bike riding through Jackson Park or talking with her father (Anthony Hopkins) at the Point actually had anything to do with my neighborhood or if they were just pretty window dressing.

Fortunately, the rest of the movie has a lot more substance. Based on the Tony-award-winning play, the story revolves around a 26-year-old woman named Catherine (Paltrow) whose father Robert has just died after a long bout with mental illness. Robert was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his era, and Catherine has inherited at least some of his genius. But she's spent the last several years ignoring her own work while she cared for him, a fact she both resents and treasures.

Into this hermetic world comes her sister Claire (Hope Davis) and Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), one of her father's proteges. Hal takes to flirting with Catherine, though he might have ulterior motives (like that pile of Robert's notebooks in the office). Claire has motives of her own--selling the house and moving Catherine out with her to New York. Claire fears that Catherine might have the same illness their father had and wants to keep an eye on her. Catherine is aghast at first, but she worries that Claire might be right. The theme of mental illness has become more common in movies. Think of A Beautiful Mind or Spider. Here, it's a consistent undercurrent, as we see, in flashback, Robert's deterioration. Even Claire, with her obsessive lists, seems to be grasping with all ten fingernails at reality.

But Proof is also about what we can know and how conclusively can we know it. In other words, can we prove anything? The play's author and movie's screenwriter, David Auburn, was a philosophy student at the U of C, and it shows. He has a good grasp of both the fundamental questions philosophy asks and the academic culture that usually surrounds such questions. Madden is also able to explore the nature of time, as the movie's present and past merge in an interesting series of flashbacks. And that theme of time also emerges as Catherine worries that her best days are behind her. Obviously, there's only so much a 100-minute movie can cover, so don't expect the equivalent of Socrates on screen. But there's a lot more meat to Proof than in most romantic dramas.

Did I say romance? Well, there's at least one reason the dreamy Jake Gyllenhaal is around. Fortunately, he and Gwenyth have decent chemistry, even if one (gratuitous) sex scene is accompanied by cheesy rock guitar. Hope Davis is her usual strong self, bringing a bristling intensity to the role of big sister. And Hopkins is more than adequate as the doting (in both senses of the word) father. All of which means that Proof has enough to satisfy both those who know and love Hyde Park and those who think I'm talking about a neighborhood in London or New York. 

J. Robert Parks  9/10/2005