Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. Let’s go back twenty years ago this month, when Harvey and his brother Bob dropped one last film — starring their most valuable player — before they embarked on a new endeavor.
It’s 2005, and Miramax is cleaning out its closet.
In March of that year, the brothers Weinstein announced that they would be leaving the venture they started together to form The Weinstein Company, which was just Miramax with a more personal name. With Bob and Harvey ready to unleash some brand-new Oscar bait through their new studio, they spent most of the year releasing all the Miramax titles that had been shelved for whatever reason.
A few received theatrical rollouts (like John Dahl’s WWII thriller The Great Raid and Terry Gilliam’s botched fantasy The Brothers Grimm, with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as the storytelling siblings), while others went directly to the shelves at video stores. The boys weren’t averse to shipping a flick straight-to-cable: their 2001 adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Gen-X memoir Prozac Nation (starring Christina Ricci as Wurtzel) had its U.S. premiere one Saturday night on Starz.
By September, they were getting rid of shit on a weekly basis. That month alone gave us the Jennifer Lopez-Robert Redford drama An Unfinished Life; the Nick Cannon action comedy Underclassman; and the Johnny Knoxville vehicle Daltry Calhoun. But, before he took off to greener pastures, Harvey knew he had to present one more film starring his beloved muse.
Proof features Miramax princess Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine, a young woman grieving over the death of her mathematician father (Anthony Hopkins), whom she took care of as he succumbed to mental illness in his final years. Adapted from David Auburn’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Proof is the Weinsteins giving us another possible Oscar contender about an attractive but troubled math prodigy – Good Will Hunting for the ladies, if you will. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Harvey snapped up the rights after longtime rival DreamWorks snagged a bunch of Oscars with their mad-mathematician biopic A Beautiful Mind.) Much like when Matt Damon’s super-intelligent janitor wowed MIT faculty by solving an impossible math problem, Catherine writes a mathematical proof that’s so groundbreaking, people can’t believe that she did it.
Proof had Paltrow reuniting with Shakespeare in Love director John Madden, who helmed a West End adaptation in 2002 that Paltrow starred in. (Mary-Louise Parker, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Anne Heche all assumed the role during its three-year Broadway run.) Weinstein initially offered Paltrow the role but she declined at first; she wanted to play Catherine on stage before taking it to the screen. Since the play mostly takes place on the backyard porch of the dad’s cluttered home, Madden and screenwriter/Daniel Day-Lewis’s boo Rebecca Miller added more locations where Paltrow and the cast (which includes Jake Gyllenhaal as a studly-but-nerdy love interest and Hope Davis as Catherine’s yuppified big sis) could go back and forth with each other.
As Catherine, Paltrow is more petulant than fragile, purposely keeping people at arm’s length for fear she’ll end up just as lost and delirious as her pops. As with most of her peak-era performances, Paltrow gives off a blasé temperament, acting as though she’s over so much of this. (Paltrow basically came up with the indifferent, vainglorious nepo-baby shtick Dakota Johnson would mine a whole career out of.)
Personal issues were beginning to make Paltrow distance herself from acting. In 2002, she lost her own father, movie/TV director Bruce Paltrow (who directed his daughter in the 2000 movie Duets), while he was in Italy, celebrating his daughter’s 30th birthday. Before shooting Proof, she gave birth to her first child, Apple, from her first marriage to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin. With another kid on the way, Paltrow was more concerned with motherhood than movies. A year before Proof’s release, Paltrow appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, along with a quote that summed up her feelings about filmmaking at the time: “I can’t imagine going back to shoot a movie.”
Proof was a flop, grossing $14 million against a $20 million budget, with critics dismissing it as a mediocre theatrical adaptation. (“Some plays are better left to the stage,” wrote Crooked Marquee’s very own Sean Burns.) Although it received zero Oscar nominations, Paltrow did get a Golden Globe nod for Best Actress in a Drama. (She lost to Desperate Housewives’ Felicity Huffman, who played a trans woman in Transamerica, a Weinstein Company film.)
Madden worked with the Weinsteins one last time, directing a long-gestating adaptation of the Elmore Leonard book Killshot for their new company. After being shelved for over two years, it died a quick death at the box office when it was quietly released in 2009. Disney’s 2010 shutdown of Miramax prompted Madden to move his next project, the 2010 Helen Mirren-Jessica Chastain thriller The Debt, over to Focus Features.
As for Paltrow, she’s mostly kept a low profile on the acting front. Although Marvel Studios got her to play Tony Stark’s main squeeze Pepper Potts in various MCU projects (including one she didn’t know she was in), she’s more known these days for her Goop wellness empire, dropping questionable, much-talked-about items like that damn vagina-scented candle. She’s scheduled to make her big comeback later this year, starring alongside Timothee Chalamet in the fact-based dramedy Marty Supreme.
She also never worked with Weinstein again after Proof, a decision she made long before he became the #MeToo movement’s most despicable offender. One of the first actresses who went on record about her problematic experiences with the man, she couldn’t deal anymore with Weinstein’s volcanic outbursts and pervy behavior. “He was a bully,” Paltrow said in 2019. “I never had a problem standing up to him. I wasn’t scared of him. I also felt for a period of time, I was the consumer face of Miramax, and I felt it was my duty to push back against him. We had a lot of fights.”
Even though the Weinsteins took a whole bunch of talent with them as they started their new careers at The Weinstein Company, Paltrow made it known that she wouldn’t be one of them. Proof was the last hurrah for both Paltrow and the bros, one last grab at Oscars statuettes before the Weinsteins broke out on their own and Paltrow stayed home with the kids, wondering how she can make a candle smell like lady parts.
“Proof” is available to stream over at Hoopla Digital, Kanopy and Pluto TV.
