Weekend movies

I have just watched a couple of unusual movies. One, "Junebug", was winner of a special jury prize at the Sundance festival. Madeleine, a sophisticated Chicago art dealer, takes a trip to North Carolina to meet the family of new husband George. This is not played for laughs like "Meet the Parents" but played out, sometimes with embarrassment as a clash of cultures. Career-dedicated Madeleine finds that real people have different values. Her husband is discovered to have a fine light tenor voice as he sings Sankey hymns as if the 1950s had never finished. Star of the show is Oscar nominee Amy Adams as heavily pregnant sister-in-law Ashley. Her garrulous dizziness smoothes over a multitude of dangerous moments. One of her statements, directed at her ne'er-do-well husband stayed with me. "God loves you just the way you are; but He loves you too much to let you stay like it."

The second, "Proof" is the opening up of the Pulitzer Prize winning stage drama of the same name, directed by John Madden who did "Shakespeare in Love". It has a stellar cast with Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal and Hope Davis (from About Schmidt). Quite difficult to follow because of the flashback structure this is not a film about math. Hopkins plays a mathematical genius who became schizophrenic. Again the topic is handled quite differently from "A Beautiful Mind". Paltrow is the daughter who stayed behind to look after sick father, while Davis is the daughter who left and became successful as both a career woman and mater familias. Gyllenhaal is the former student of Hopkins who has settled on a second-rate teaching career while remaining in awe of the genius mathematician. Paltrow is a competent mathematician; she has inherited some of her father's talents, but has she inherited his madness? She is certainly rather strange.

The action takes place around the father's funeral. The tensions are clear. Resentment at being left to look after an ailing parent, guilt at leaving, ambition to find an undiscovered masterpiece among the notebooks of the mad period, all come to the surface at the hypocritical funeral service when all the former colleagues are there to laud the early successes and to sweep under the carpet the neglect during the mad years.

Then a notebook is found containing an elegant proof about prime numbers. You don't have to understand the math. This could equally well have been a work of art, a novel, a poem, a symphony. The question is, “Who wrote it, the father or the daughter?” The daughter claims it, but who would believe her? Certainly not the sensible sister. How about the new lover? This is a story about real people who despite genius experience the same emotions of jealousy, guilt, resentment and forgiveness that we all feel.