Proof

Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) in a scene from Proof.

(Herald rating * * * )

If the screen adaptation of David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play never sheds its stage shackles, that's both its weakness and its strength. It is, after all, pre-eminently a play about ideas and the film version's static, enclosed quality allows us to contemplate them. But the characters' humanity is too often outshone by the sparkling script.

The drama unfolds in the territory where genius becomes hard to distinguish from madness. Hearing that, we may instantly think of A Beautiful Mind, but Auburn's play has none of that film's banality or treacly sentimentality.

Paltrow reprises the role she played in the West End and she's in the familiar and safe hands here of Madden, who was at the helm when she starred in Shakespeare in Love. She plays Catherine, the troubled daughter of brilliant mathematician Robert (Hopkins) who, at the end of a distinguished academic life, descended into dementia.

We meet father and daughter in an early scene when we realise with a shock that he is already dead and the conversation is a figment of her imagination. The second and more potent plot surprise comes much later and in an instant, the playwright's main concerns - about the nature of genius, the fragility of trust and the sexist collegiality of academic life - leap into centre stage.

But for much of its length it's a slow burn as two other characters come into the orbit of the grieving Catherine: her fussy, bossy sister Claire (Davis) and Robert's ex-student Hal (Gyllenhaal), who is desperate to see whether he can find anything lucid in the notebooks Robert filled with maniacal scribblings in his final months.

There's much to like in a film that is constructed with the precision of a mathematical theorem but where A Beautiful Mind overflowed with a bogus and showy kind of humanity, Proof is fatally short of it.

Davis inhabits her character with the most conviction but sadly it's the cast's most jarring cliche.

Gyllenhaal, by contrast, never convinces us and Hopkins, turning in the most vacant performance he's offered since he last played an academic (in The Human Stain) seems not even to have convinced himself.

And Paltrow, who is playing a character on the edge, is trying to be vulnerable but she's having too much fun with a witty and provocative text.

CAST: Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis, Jake Gyllenhaal
DIRECTOR: John Madden
RUNNING TIME: 100 mins
RATING: M, sex scenes, offensive language
SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday