David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Proof," like most Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, is better as a play than as a
movie. Few things get better when they are removed from their original medium and shoehorned into a different one, after all. But "Proof" is brilliant enough as a play that even if you only capture SOME of the genius on film, as John Madden has done, you're still left with a pretty good movie. Auburn wrote the screenplay, too (aided by Rebecca Miller), including a few new scenes aimed at making the film feel, well, less like a play. (More locations, more characters, and so forth.) And Gwyneth Paltrow, who played the lead role in London's West End, reprises it to great effect here, contributing her best dramatic work since ... what, "Shakespeare in Love"? Which was also directed by John Madden? There may be a lesson there, Gwynnie. Paltrow plays Catherine, the 27-year-old daughter of a legendarily brilliant University of Chicago mathematician named Robert (Anthony Hopkins). Dad has just died after many years of declining lucidity and usefulness, during which Cathy put her own life on hold to care for him, her mother being dead and her sister Claire (Hope Davis) living in New York.
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