300 Years after Lear:Two Daughters,a Fathers Legacy,in Proof - Essay Example

Shakespeare's King Lear, nearing the end of his life, asked his three daughters each to demonstrate that they loved him more than the other two. While his two treacherous daughters eagerly compete, Cordelia, his faithful daughter, refuses to take part in the charade and, ironically, is banished as a result. Proof looks more at the interaction of two daughters who must decide how to handle their father's affairs; this movie takes place after the death of Catherine and Claire's father, Robert, who had been a groundbreaking mathematician at the University of Chicago until mental illness debilitated him.

Each of these daughters is flawed, which makes their interaction more intriguing, and makes deciding who is the more stable sister problematic. Claire went away to New York City and made a financial success for herself. Indeed, it is her success that pays the bills and affords Catherine the opportunity to live at her father's house with no other occupation than taking care of him. Catherine shares her father's brilliance at mathematics and made an early attempt at success outside his shadow, by enrolling at Northwestern to pursue her own studies.

However, once his illness made him unable to take care of himself, she immediately moved home to care for him. Because neither sister could be said to have been ideal in the situation, it becomes necessary for them to engage one another to make the best decisions for their father's affairs, and to move on as adults after their father's passing. A key element to an analysis of the two sisters is an examination of Catherine's mind. It is fairly clear that Claire wonders whether or not her sister has the same susceptibility to mental illness that her father suffered.

The way that Catherine responds to Claire's smothering shows that, even in her own mind, Catherine at times wonders about her own stability. Catherine's stumbling speech at her father's memorial service is an excellent example of events that plant that seed of doubt in her sister's mind. Clearly, Catherine is a woman of conflicted desires. Should she have abandoned her own immediate prospects for academic achievement by coming home and taking care of her father, or should she just have arranged for a nurse to look after him while she advanced professionally Is Hal someone that Catherine can ultimately trust with her heart, or is he simply a mathematical vulture, seeking to loot whatever academic treasures he can from her father's notebooks Catherine's troubled looks and faltering speech demonstrate the ambiguity that results from inner warfare (Ebert), and so this scene shows many of the troubling questions that remain for the two sisters to answer.

What will be next for Catherine - a caretaker of her own, or a return to independence Another scene that gives some key insight into Catherine's mind occurs after she sleeps with Hal. One of the problems that Catherine mulls over in her mind is to decide how much she can trust Hal. After the funeral party for her father, Catherine ends up in bed with Hal, and then ends up giving him a key to a drawer in her father's desk, which contains some of her father's last work: paperwork that may represent a revolutionary proof in the field of mathematics (hence the title of the movie), or it may be a pile of gibberish from the last ravings of a mentally ill man.

It may also be not just the work of Robert; Catherine may have collaborated on the work. This question of authorship is one of the central concerns of the film, as well. What makes this scene of particular interest is the