Proof ** out of ****

Three good actors visiting old haunts. Willing flesh. Weak spirit.

Given its cast, pedigree and subject matter, "Proof" is a surprisingly minor, insignificant picture, clever and moving on a Lifetime Channel frequency, but thin and immature otherwise. Adapted by David Auburn and Rebecca Miller from Auburn's Pultizer Prize-winning play, it suffers from arch, rat-a-tat dialogue that works on stage but drones onscreen, and most painfully predictable casting that finds Anthony Hopkins as a mad genius, Gwyneth Paltrow as a melancholy girl, and Hope Davis as another bossy shrew. To the well, to the well, to the well - and now the water's tepid and soot-ridden.

Paltrow is Catherine, an amateur mathematician wilting under the smothering pressure of sister Claire (Davis) and the memory of just-buried father Robert (Hopkins), a Chicago University professor who, like some mathematicians, made landmark discoveries in his early 20s, coasted on tenure, and then slowly went insane. Director John Madden only reveals glimpses of Robert's downward spiral before his death through Catherine's harsh eulogy at his funeral; the movie is more occupied with Catherine's struggle to cut her own figure in life when she shares her father's talents. Especially when one of her Robert's old students, Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovers a brilliant proof that Catherine claims to have written, then locked away out of respect - and fear.

Because the answer to this mystery is obvious whether you've seen the play or not - let it be said it is the less interesting of the two possibilities - "Proof" must churn its pleasures from performance and direction, both of which are uninspired. Madden prefers pretty to intense, and so a play entirely comprised of interiors is opened up to the towering Chicago oaks and softly falling snow. Dust is caught only when dancing in a concentrated sunbeam.

Paltrow plays Catherine as a whiny waif, while Davis kneads the exact same dough she has for years. Hopkins, as Robert, is asked to assume an odd role - that of an insane man whose insanity is alluded to but never shown. "Proof" focuses on his blustery "lucid" year between manic episodes, and leaves no explanation for the descent, apparently preferring we watch "A Beautiful Mind" and borrow the life arc of John Forbes Nash. Catherine and Claire's mother is not mentioned, strange for characters reflecting on the death of one parent.

And the movie speaks incessantly of math without ever dissecting any of its meaning. What's a creative proof? How do new and old methodologies differ? Auburn and Miller supply the words - Madden neglects the music. The characters should talk in a vacuum. The audience should not see in one.