Number Crunching

Possibly better on stage but otherwise a pointed mood-inducing film about inspiration, life-prioritizing, and integrity.

On the eve of her birthday and her father’s funeral Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) sits in front of a TV surfing through channels late one night when she is visited by the presence of her father’s memory. Catherine’s father Robert (Anthony Hopkins) was a brilliant mathematician responsible for many new headways in the field, so much so that his generation and those following revere his memory as well as his work including Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) a student who has come to the house where Robert lived with Catherine to look over his note books to try to understand if there is a last great work to publish for the world. Catherine is troubled by the recent passing of her father partly because she had given up her own college career to move back home to stay with him at the end, but also because of her suspicion of the possibility that she may have inherited her father’s mental instability. When Catherine’s sister Claire (Hope Davis) arrives to attend the funeral she also explains that she has sold the house where Catherine and Robert have been living and begins packing up the furniture and dish ware. When Catherine gives Hal a notebook with a ground breaking historic new mathematical proof that she claims she has written, Hal and Claire suspect that Catherine may be falling into madness.

There’s always a knack for the average movie-goer to be moved by something he doesn’t understand especially when it appears importantly technical like higher-level mathematics. Most of us don’t have the knowledge about how technical advanced physics works, and just like the ancient Greek language with its unusual look, unless we have had years of education in that particular field of study we don’t really get it, and it is this great unknown area that allows filmmakers to romanticize a type of madness that accompanies savants in these areas of expertise.

When the viewer is told how great a man like Robert was in his knowledge of a mathematical area, we accept it as a basis for the film to function. It isn’t the details of the proof in the film that’s important to the viewer but rather the fact that the proof was written and the possibility that it exists as a ground-breaking new mathematical solution to a problem, much like the subtle amazing formulae that Albert Einstein published after wallowing in obscurity for so many years.

This high-concept film relies on the emotional bond between people and ignores the real mathematics, referring to it as some great romantic intellectual ability that separates Robert and Catherine from everyone else in the universe of the film, a world where Robert’s intelligence and ground-breaking math proofs seemingly have even eluded him. Look at the way the actual script of the math formulae is photographed- there’s never any real explicit showing of the nuts and bolts of the work, only glossy passing shots to give the film lots of flavor. This works perfectly to support director John Madden’s film and its main thrust that great knowledge and ability should be cherished and developed like a rare flower.

The film’s main purpose is to advertise the greatness of math, and the need for geeks in the world to revel in their greatness- they can be cool too as is exhibited by Gyllenhaal’s Hal and the band that plays a silent song for 3 minutes in honor of Robert’s greatness.

The ground-breaking proof that Robert forces Catherine to read, on a mathematical level is gibberish and is presented to show the mad aging mathematician’s slipping grip on sanity, but for the non-mathematical-minded the writing is quite nice- it is a mix of algebraic symbolism and poetic imagery- here again the scene is loaded so that the context shows how the sense of math has become nonsense. Hats off to two great actors Paltrow and Hopkins who like the well-trained craftsmen they are, play the emotional core of the relationship of the characters and rightly ignore what the math actually means.

Hope Davis plays the thank-less role of the level-headed older sister who is a financial analyst, a character with a knack for numbers who is doing something with her inherited talent form her father that insure her a better life without the cerebral satisfaction that comes from intellectual pursuit of mathematics. The story almost slips over to her point of view because we can readily get with her character’s belief that the tangible things like home, family and career may supersede mathematical intellectualism.

It’s too bad that the film doesn’t delve into Claire’s character more completely. We see lots of the indicative characterization like the incessant cell-phone chatter Claire exhibits as she drives to the funeral, and the crisp way that Clair has put herself together, and the clear precise way that she explains the function of the world as she has arranged it and the fact that she has decided what Catherine’s fate will be in New York.

Davis’s Claire is given an out when, in one line explains that she “paid off the mortgage” to the house where Robert and Catherine lived while living in a studio apartment in New York. This allows the essential theme of the film to gain a bit more traction in its basic point that intellectual integrity is more important than a better financial life, but the film stacks the cards to insure that the viewer will see this clearly from Catherine’s emotionally fractured stand point.

It’s a pretty good adaptation of a stage play although I saw Anne Heche do the play in New York and there was a richer sense of humor between the characters that has been excised from the film – too bad really because it gave Catherine a rounded personality that made her more human in the viewer’s eyes compared to the dour depressing genius she appears to be in the film.

The film will affect anyone who has ever experienced the death of a parent and perhaps some of the angst that accompanies it, as well as the double-barreled theme that intellectual brilliance as positive personal values can enrich one’s life. Watch it with a good friend and cup of hot cocoa.