Proof that something is missing

Proof/Brokeback Mountain
Venice

David Auburn's Proof, at least partly about the thin line between genius and madness, has the advantage of having the same director and same star as the production at the Donmar Warehouse.

But it is a little more difficult for director John Madden and Gwyneth Paltrow as the confused young mathematician succouring an ailing genius of a father, to negotiate as a film. Even when skilfully opened out for the screen, it loses some of the sense of an enclosed and sometimes almost suffocating academic world which made the original work so striking.

What we get is still a film of some substance, as faithful as possible to the play. But an over-insistent score that seems bent on telling us what both director and actors have already more than hinted at is not a help; and every time the film leaves the house, where the meat of the argument takes place, we lose a head of steam.

What we still get is a fine performance from Paltrow, who watches her father fill notebook after notebook with what he thinks is the answer to a mathematical conundrum but suspects it is nothing of the sort, and who winces at the thought that her own mind may have the same flaws as his. Anthony Hopkins is highly effective, too, as a man who cannot quite believe he is finished as a leading academic even though he knows he is ill.

Hope Davis, as the meddling sister who wants to get Paltrow's character away from this skewed world, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the young student who, when the father dies, wants to get hold of his notebooks, do well in less grateful parts. But the film looks like a play transposed, albeit sensitively.

Even so, its intense emotional landscape comes over well, as does the destructive force of minds trapped in a kind of stasis. And it doesn't betray the strength of Auburn's imagination.

Ang Lee describes Brokeback Mountain as a great American love story. It is certainly an audacious one, based on Annie Proulx's short story about two men who fall in love in the Wyoming of the early Sixties. They know nothing of gay life and scarcely dare even to contemplate the implications of their affair.

They are a ranch-hand (Heath Ledger) and a rodeo cowboy (Jake Gyllenhaal) who line up for employment with Randy Quaid's local rancher and are dispatched to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain. They must part at the end of summer and go their separate ways.

The ranch hand marries his sweetheart (Michelle Williams) with whom he has two daughters. The rodeo rider marries a rodeo queen (Anne Hathaway) and has a son. But they can't forget each other and the passage of time only strengthens their relationship. Everything that once seemed simple becomes infinitely complicated.

What Ang Lee and his actors have to achieve is a convincing world, set deep in the Wyoming and Texas countryside, from which the two sublimely innocent men cannot escape. Otherwise, we might well feel that all they have to do is to hitch to the West Coast where homosexuality, even in the early Sixties, was a state of nature that dared not speak its name.

That the film is successful is down to the detail, which Ang Lee supplies in abundance, and the unforced nature of the playing from Ledger and Gyllenhaal.