Lank hair

And then there was Proof, during which I was mentally violated by Gwyneth Paltrow.

To avoid charges of bias, I will fess up right here. I mean, you can still charge me with bias, but since I will have admitted it, there seems little point, hmm?

Here is the basis of my bias: Gwyneth annoys the crap out of me. There is nobody else whose hair I want to pull more. And Baby CHEESES will someone ever give the woman a carb? She is critically in need of a feed of rice pudding. You can actually see her wasting away on screen.

Gwyneth evidently attended the Tom Cruise School of Acting, whereby as long as you have a minimum freaky charisma allied with plasticity of skin, you can employ one, single gesture to cover all human emotion and pass it off as acting. (In Tom Cruise’s case, this is of course the double-hand point. In Gwyneth’s, a bewildered frown with eyes crossed.)

Director: Cut, cut, CUT! Goddamit! Babydoll, get your sweet ass over here!

Gwyneth: I presume one is referring to me.

Director: Who? Yeah, whatever. Gwynnie honey. Since your features are so pale and indistinct, we need you to – what’s it called again? – oh yeah. We need you to ACT more.

Gwyneth: I can act you know. I won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

Director: What’s that? You might want to speak up while you’re at it. I want you to EMOTE. I want to see the spit, I wanna FEEL the sweat. Set to it, there’s a good girl.

Director (aside to sub director): Stupid bitch. Needs a good feed of rice pudding.

I have no idea how she won an Oscar, although I can only conclude she must have donated many varied and nasty sexual favours to the entire Academy.

Now that’s out of the way: in Proof, Gwyneth plays the petulant, whiny, lank-haired daughter of a brilliant mathematician. She gives up her own studies when dad goes woopdewoohoo and then misplaces his mortal coil. Then her father’s student finds a notebook containing a mind-blowing proof to some theorem, which Gwyneth claims she wrote.

Honestly, it’s a stretch believing Gwyneth is capable of forming coherent sentences, never mind that she is a mathematical genius.

Gwyneth’s character is consumed by the likelihood of following her father into insanity. She appears to be crazy because she fears going crazy. Which is undoubtedly tragic but no more than, say, genocide – or any number of other things.

Her sister is supposed to be a harridan, but all I felt was sympathy for her. She turns up the day before their father’s funeral try to persuade Gwyneth to wash her hair – I completely understood where she was coming from – and Gwyneth gets all snotty about hair being dead tissue so Jojoba Oil won’t make any difference. Well, I’ve used Jojoba on my own dead tissue and the stuff is a miracle, so that shows you how much she knows.

Jake Gyllenhaal is her father’s former student, the drummer in a rock band of maths geeks. This time I suspended disbelief – hung it by the neck until dead – and then tried swinging it around and juggling it a while, but it was no good: maths geeks are just not that good looking. Trust me. I studied maths, and we were a dull looking bunch of monobrows. The best bit in the movie is the band’s song ‘i’, comprising three minutes of silence.

Disregarding all that, the movie is worth a watch.