Peter Bradshaw on Proof
"[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."
- Peter Bradshaw writing in The Guardian
This quote comes from a less-than-complimentary review of the new film Proof starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal. The movie is about lonely, geeky mathematicians and a brilliant new proof of something vaguely primer-number related (the audience is never really enlightened).
The review compares Proof to other recent math-related films, including Pi (which "did not have this middlebrow, palliative insistence on genius-equals-loneliness") and A Beautiful Mind (in which Russell Crowe "proved what a beautiful mind he had by hallucinating and wearing trousers that were a couple of inches too short").
But Bradshaw also notes that in A Beautiful Mind, the scriptwriters at least try to explain a bit of game theory, whereas in Proof, mathematics is just "a style accessory".
The entire article is available here.