Bedlam Proofs

I wonder if I should give myself a lone gesture, like Catherine in the opening of the film, and make a toast with my coffee to auspicious beginnings. Proof is not solely an agenda film, of course, and it is charmingly plagued by the romantic vision of mental illness that the West has held since Goethe bequeathed young Werther to an equally young Europe of the eighteenth century. Catherine may stick it in the face of Robert's mourners in the Rockefeller Chapel, but the film can still be viewed as a romantic metaphor, asking the questions I raised in my last post, and yet only touching on the real grit and hardship that comes with handling diseased brains and bodies: Robert stank? Try dealing with incontinence on a daily basis and not come out of that with some degree of belligerence to the ableist majority around you and not get ambushed for it.

I did, and in fact do get subjected to ambushes daily: my building managers, case managers from providers of one sort or another; my career, in fact, when I had it, was based on my ability to case manage those as marginalized as myself, based on my knowledge of the system. The gloriously modern notion of making sure we fit everyone in the right modality, and in turn fitting those into the right paradigm and expecting *compliance*.

The movie resists this aspect of modern society even while acknowledging it, especially in the flashback where Catherine finds Robert sitting at the table outside the house during an evening snowfall, believing that his machinery (mind) had come back to life. The scene might have been taken right out of a Bing Crosby performance of Silver Bells. In some ways the film can even be seen as a meta-accolade to Hopkins himself, for being the Lawrence Olivier of our generation.

I was less enthralled with Jake Gyllenhaal as Hal Dobbs, the former student of Robert's and would be lover of Catherine. He looks and acts like a muppet on steroids in playing his part, and was somewhat better cast as the cartoonist in The Zodiac Killer. Still, he and Paltrow both exhibit a refreshing fragility in a film that challenges us to think without getting sanctimonious about which version of the truth its audience should best believe.