Author Topic: Proof Play Vs. Movie  (Read 3918 times)

Bruce

  • Newbie
  • Posts: 1
Proof Play Vs. Movie
« on: October 06, 2005, 02:26:11 PM »
I haven't seen the movie but PROOF worked wonders on the stage. The first revelation, that Catherine is interacting with her desceased father, worked because we were experiencing this flesh and blood incarnation of her father right along with her. I don't know how well this works on film but on the stage, this challenged us to question every action that followed. We knew that our narrator was unreliable.

For better or worse, movie stars carry overtones of past performances with them. Jake Gyllenhaal has a history of guilelessness that may lead us to disregard Catherine's suspicions about his motives. On Broadway, Jennifer Jason Leigh played Catherine, which probably helped train the focus on the narrator's unreliability and madness.

Looking at the cast list, I see that the play has been "fleshed out" with several minor characters. Going beyond Catherine's tiny world increases the probability that what we are seeing is being faithfully reported by the movie camera.

Your reviews expressed a yearning for less plot and more character insight, which suggests to me that the play's strong point of view was somehow blunted. The strength of a successful film adaptation of PROOF would work something like MEMENTO. We would be working to piece together a coherent set of facts from the information presented us.

The brilliance of the play was that it led us through an intellectual exercise analogous to solving a mathematical problem. That's what made an explanation of the proof itself irrelevant.