Proof Review

David Auburn's play runs on the suspicion that genius and illness arrive in the same package, and John Madden keeps its best asset intact, the argument over who actually wrote the notebook. Gwyneth Paltrow had already played Catherine for Madden on the London stage, and it shows in how exactly she knows where the character's hostility comes from; the scene where she watches her sister price the house is played almost entirely with her jaw. Anthony Hopkins is careful and unshowy as a mathematician whose mind has gone, best on the winter porch, where a page of what looks like recovered brilliance turns out to be a rambling note about the cold.

Hope Davis makes the practical sister sympathetic rather than a villain, which the writing does not always help her do. What the film cannot solve is its own staginess. Alwin Kuchler lights Chicago in a flat greenish television wash, the opened out scenes on campus and at the funeral feel added rather than discovered, and Jake Gyllenhaal's Hal never stops being a device, the likeable man who asks the questions an audience needs asked.