Proof


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"


Peter Bradshaw
Friday February 10, 2006
The Guardian

Unstable mathematical geniuses - don't you adore them? What with their prime numbers and their cubed-roots and their picturesque mental illnesses. Don't you just want to enfold them in your protective embrace, alleviate their loneliness, while at the same time trumpeting their insights to the academic community?
It hasn't been that long since Russell Crowe, playing mathematician John Nash, proved what a beautiful mind he had by hallucinating and wearing trousers that were a couple of inches too short. Now Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins play a mathematical-genius daughter-and-daddy team; Gwyneth gets to be a tortured talent by imagining that her dead father is alive and shuffling into the kitchen for concerned late-night chats. And Hopkins, as so often in the past, does a lot of SUDDEN SHOUTING. Two other characters summarise his situation in the following exchange: "The man was a genius!" - "He was also nuts!" And this is the subtly imagined dichotomy in which rewarding emotional drama is supposed to reside.
Hopkins plays a distinguished mathematician, deceased just before the action begins, whose best work was in his early 20s, and who lately suffered from a psychiatric disorder. His outstandingly clever but unhappy daughter (Paltrow) dropped out of college to care for him. Hopkins's super-bright research assistant, Jake Gyllenhaal, now wishes to gain access to Gwyneth's knickers and also to her stash of dad's notebooks, which may contain a brilliant new mathematical proof of something or other, arrived at during a miraculous late period of lucidity. But wait. Gwyneth says she wrote this new proof. Can she prove it? Can Jake prove he really loves her? Is "proof" a control-freaky thing that's preventing them from going with the rich spontaneous flow of life? Can the concept of proof be turned into any other dull metaphors?
We are invited to believe that Hopkins, Paltrow and Gyllenhaal all have, in their various ways, alpha-brains. They look to me like they couldn't recite the three-times-table without smoke coming out of their ears. Gwyneth Paltrow does a kind of lip-biting anguished look that is possibly the result of trying to work out 20 minus 17 in her head. And it is particularly unnerving that her romantic interest is with Jake Gyllenhaal who here models a diluted version of the nerdy-vulnerable look that was his line before raising his game in Brokeback Mountain. Here it is Paltrow who gets to be Donella Darko without the rabbit while Jake does his best to connect with her. But really: Gwyneth and Jake - what a terrifying collision of sensitiveness. Any resulting children would be gold-medallists in the Emoting Olympics.
At the funeral address, Paltrow puts the congregation of smug academics to shame at the lectern by asking where they all were during the last years of her late father's illness and shocks them by saying she had to look after him while he spent his time shamblingaround in slippers, talking to himself - and that he "stank". Needless to say, these raw realities are never dramatised in any of the coy flashbacks, and the craziest Hopkins gets is writing his notebooks outdoors in the freezing cold weather, with nary a goosebump on his bare forearms, while ersatz snowflakes flutter sweetly about.
Hope Davis arrives in town for the funeral, playing the uptight careerist sister, who has inherited a modest smidge of dad's math prowess, and has put it to work as some sort of Wall Street whiz. With clunking lack of tact, she turns up in her knife-sharp outfit jabbering into her cellphone, and insists on taking Gwyneth shopping for clothes, when all the poor girl wants to do is mope around the kitchen, drink coffee and gaze woundedly out of the window. Hope's appearance is supposed to highlight Gwyneth's superiority in the brains and sensitivity department, yet Hope is carefully allotted a scene in which she gets (non-sexually) drunk with a physicist to ensure she isn't unsympathetic.
John Madden - who directed Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love and Judi Dench in Mrs Brown - is a very formidable professional who does his considerable best with the ropey material available to him. And to be fair, this movie isn't the first to make the hackneyed association of genius and mental instability, as if science or maths isn't interesting enough on its own, or as if people with mental problems aren't allowed to exist without also being geniuses. Darren Aronofsky's Pi did not have this middlebrow, palliative insistence on genius-equals-loneliness though Derek Jarman's austere account of the life of Wittgenstein was a little in thrall to this fallacy. There is something feeble in the way this movie simply isn't up to explaining anything at all about this alleged proof. For all its faults, Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind had an honest stab at explaining game theory, but Proof makes maths just a style accessory. It doesn't add up.

address- przemówienie
allot- wyznaczać, przydzielać (np. zadanie)
anguish- katusze, ból
austere- surowy, skromny, prosty
careerist- karierowicz
clunking- łomoczący
coy- nieśmiały, wstydliwy; skromny
cubed-root- pierwiastek trzeciego stopnia
decease- umrzeć
dilute- rozcieńczać
distinguish- rozróżniać, odróżniać
enfold- otulić, otoczyć
fallacy- błąd logiczny
flutter- fruwać, trzepotać
formidable- ogromny, onieśmielający
goosebump- gęsia skórka
hackney- dorożka; taksówka; powszechnego użytku, do wynajęcia
have a stab at- spróbować (czegoś)
highlight- podkreślać
(be) in thrall to- ulec (czemuś)
jabber- paplać
lucidity- jasność, jasna myśl, klarowność
middlebrow- przeciętny, niewymagający myślenia
nary= “not a”, “never a”
nerdy- niezręczny, nieatrakcyjny
palliative- łagodzący, uśmierzający ból
prime number- liczba pierwsza
prowess- biegłość, umiejętności
rewarding- satysfakcjonujący
ropey- marny, marnej jakości
shamble- powłóczyć nogami, wlec się
shuffle- szurać, powłóczyć nogami
smidge- odrobinka
smug- zadowolony z siebie; próżny
stash- ukrywać; schowek
trumpet- rozgłaszać
unnerving- wyprowadzający z równowagi, irytujący
uptight- spięty, sztywny
vulnerable- czuły; podatny; bezbronny


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