  
| 
| ||||||||||||
  EW review: Lacking 'Proof''Illuminated' fascinating, 'War' emptyBy Owen Gleiberman  Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins in "Proof." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- Gwyneth Paltrow, in her powerful performance in "Sylvia," caught the scary tenor of mental illness -- the way that Sylvia Plath, in her forcefulness and creeping rage, kept crashing through the fragile foundations of a weak identity. In "Proof," Paltrow plays yet another young woman who is being gnawed at by termites of instability, only this time out, her performance, rather than startling, is merely competent: earnest and overly familiar. She's one more depressive mope in dirty lank hair and an oversize wool-knit sweater, whining about how unfair the world is -- a character who, for all of her meticulously embedded quirkiness, borders on type. On the eve of her 27th birthday, Catherine (Paltrow), the heroine of David Auburn's thin if celebrated Broadway play, is a nervous, stammering, misfit wallflower who has spent most of her adult life caring for her brilliant mathematician father. Robert, played by Anthony Hopkins in snowy white hair and beard, with an avuncular manner of brainy excitement, did revolutionary work in his early 20s and then suffered a massive breakdown; he may have been institutionalized. He has maintained a casual, on-and-off relationship with reality ever since, and Catherine may or may not have inherited both her father's tendencies: his genius and his insanity. "Proof" has been reworked for the big screen, with restructuring and added dialogue, by Auburn and Rebecca Miller, and the director, John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love"), has opened up the action so that it now flows through airports and Armani boutiques and bustling university corridors. Yet "Proof" remains one of those clever, facile plays that tries to be ambiguous and tidy at the same time. It's like "The Glass Menagerie" rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The movie opens just after Robert's death, when Catherine, still living in her father's messy, book-laden cocoon of a college-town clapboard house, plays host to two visitors, both of whom she regards, in her muzzy paranoia, as intruders. There's Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a handsome young grad student who studied under Catherine's dad and is now looking through his notebooks, searching, amid the psychotic scribblings, for any lost nuggets of mathematical theory he may have left behind. The aspiring prof also plays drums in a rock band, which allows the movie to include at least a scene or two that consists of something other than dolefully dry debate. Then there's Claire (Hope Davis), Catherine's sister, a New York yuppie who, in her patronizing desperation to save her sibling, would like to neaten up every loose end within reach, including ... Catherine's hair. The two have a conversation in which Claire pushes the wonders of jojoba, a substance Catherine has apparently never heard of. It's the sort of pointed stage dialogue that revolves around overly ordered dichotomies: chatty, well-groomed consumer princess versus morose, unkempt academic beatnik. Yet all I could think was, Is Catherine so out of it that she has never even glanced at the label of a shampoo bottle? "Proof" flirts with hefty themes, yet too often it barely tethers them to a recognizable, lived-in world. Nosing around Robert's notebooks, Hal doesn't find a lot, at least not until Catherine directs him to a solitary notebook in a locked desk drawer. It contains a visionary proof, a theorem of more than 40 pages that could be the proof, as well, of Robert's restored sanity. Yet did he write what was in the notebook, or was it Catherine herself? And if she wrote the proof, is it also proof that she inherited his gifts, or confirmation that she's doomed to repeat his slide into madness? The link between higher mathematics and mental derangement had genuine resonance in "A Beautiful Mind," but in Proof the connection is far too axiomatic. Auburn withholds key information about his characters, then passes off the missing puzzle pieces as "mystery." In flashback, Hopkins plays Robert as a saint of knowledge, desperate to get "the machinery" -- his grasp of higher numerical systems -- working. His instability, on the other hand, is portrayed in a cut-rate fashion. Paltrow, speaking in a dishrag whimper, works to give Catherine a tremulous vulnerability, but she lacks the obsessiveness of a numbers-driven personality. The movie turns the issue of who authored the proof into a gimmicky, diminished game of did-she-or-didn't-she? It's hard to quarrel with the way "Proof" depicts mathematical genius as an unknowable abstraction. Otherwise, we might need advanced degrees to watch it. If only the film didn't carry that same intellectual shorthand over to its portrayal of mental illness, as though insanity were a light switch that could be flipped on or off. "Proof" is watchable but second-rate, the minds it depicts too finite to be beautiful. EW Grade: B- 'Everything Is Illuminated'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum Elijah Wood's night-creature eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of old-man eyeglasses, convey a lot about the cracked intensity of the young man called Jonathan Safran Foer in "Everything Is Illuminated." That such a comically somber investigator of his own family's old-country roots carries the same name as the author of the acclaimed novel on which this loving adaptation is based is just one of the book's meta flourishes enthusiastically embraced by first-time feature filmmaker Liev Schreiber. Actors talk about wanting to stretch, but few would hazard a project with such a high degree of difficulty as Schreiber, who also wrote the screenplay. And under the circumstances, Schreiber's heartfelt project earns points for disciplined ambition. The gloomy tenderness Wood brings to Foer as he searches for his grandfather's vanished birthplace is offset by the maniacal Eastern European practicality of Eugene Hutz's Alex, a truly terrible interpreter. For one of those obstreperously original books that are themselves impossible to translate, "Everything Is Illuminated" is impressively well lit. EW Grade: B+ 'The Thing About My Folks'Reviewed by Scott Brown You can't fake love, the primary ingredient in "The Thing About My Folks," a Paul Reiser-penned attempt at intergenerational rapprochement. Unfortunately, you also can't hide gooey self-justification, no matter how hard you try. "Thing" is Woody Allen on a third-grade reading level. Neurosis abounds, but awareness doesn't, and certain "jokes" demand additional therapy: Any movie that casually equates "a freshly bathed baby" with "my father's balls" cries out for another round on the couch. "My Father's Balls" would have made a more appropriate title, actually: This is a father-and-son (Peter Falk and Reiser) road picture, the kind that builds to a big, inevitable "I'm sorry." Seems Mom (Olympia Dukakis) has mysteriously left Dad after more than 40 fairly ordinary years together, and sonny boy is inclined to pin the blame on pops. But the story, much like the marriage, isn't about Mom: It's about men not so much tackling responsibility as passing it off laterally, and finally pulling an end run into the schmaltz zone. EW Grade: C+ 'Lord of War'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman It's clear that writer-director Andrew Niccol did his homework before making "Lord of War," the tale of an international arms dealer. Watching the movie, which is like a feature-length trailer crossed with a lecture held together by Nicolas Cage's "hard-boiled" narration ("They say every man has his price, but not every man gets it"), we learn that the outlaws who sell arms on the black market deal in Uzis, Glocks, and Kalashnikov assault rifles; that they'll offer their products to everyone from the rebels of Lebanon to the dictator of Liberia (Eamonn Walker). More than that -- and this is the film's big insight, so hold on to your popcorn -- we learn that weapons salesmen are sleazy troubleshooters who don't care about the harm they cause. Gosh. Cage's Yuri Orlov, partnering with his party-boy brother (Jared Leto), isn't much more than a generic crooked businessman boating off in dangerous gray suits to the world's trouble spots. "Lord of War" comes on like it's the "GoodFellas" of global assault hardware, but Niccol stages ideas for scenes rather than the scenes themselves. He never quite creates a present tense, and the result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie. EW Grade: D- 'Separate Lies'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum In recent years, Tom Wilkinson has embodied a good priest ("The Exorcism of Emily Rose"), a bad mobster ("Batman Begins"), a stripper ("The Full Monty"), and a man longing to be a woman ("Normal"). But not since "In the Bedroom," where he so fully filled the sagging contours of a grieving American father and husband, has the superb, substantial British actor had such a chance to shine as he does in the superior British society drama "Separate Lies." Playing an upper-crust lawyer whose comfortable life in a marriage based more on shared property and silverware than shared intimacy is blown apart by infidelity and circumstance, Wilkinson once again astonishes with his ability to convey weakness and strength, hypocrisy and gallantry, cruelty and compassion in the same male animal. And more specifically, in the same English male animal of a certain caste, a species in which the writer-director, Julian Fellowes, takes great sociological delight. Adapting Nigel Balchin's novel "A Way Through the Wood" with a sophisticated appreciation of deception and accommodation in the service of a workable reality among grown-ups, the fellow who scripted "Gosford Park" makes a promising directorial debut. In "Separate Lies," James (Wilkinson) and his silky wife, Anne (Emily Watson), live a well-polished routine of city-home/country-home domesticity, upended when Anne -- bored, restless, in a rut of privilege -- saunters into an affair with Bill (Rupert Everett), a mischief maker of even greater fiscal means and emotional ennui. An accident, a death, a few secrets kept in complicity, and pretty soon the angles of the relationship geometry shift, and shift again. Watson excels at sustaining a reckless hunger draped in pearls, and Everett -- his handsome face strangely sculpted into a disturbing amalgam of beauty and excess -- is frighteningly good at conveying louche hauteur. But it's Wilkinson who embodies everything unexpectedly passionate and actually human about this very particular, very entangled drama. By the hang of his fine suit jacket, the actor conveys a wealth of information about how much a man -- no less a man spoiled by privilege -- can carry on his shoulders even when his whole world feels like it's crumbling. EW Grade: A- Click Here 
|
| ||||||||||||
| © 2007 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. Site Map. |
 |
|
to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly
External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com
Pay service with live and archived video. 
