Question: Build a movie plot around this: who suspects that Catherine is suffering the onset of mental illness? Claire
Answer:
The plot alternates between events immediately following the death of Robert (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant mathematician whose genius was undone by crippling mental illness, and flashbacks revealing the life he shared with his daughter Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow). Catherine is also a mathematician, but she struggles with living in her father's shadow, with balancing her demanding studies with caring for her father and also with the fear that she may have inherited his mental illness. At home, Robert clings to sanity by constantly bombarding Catherine with complex mathematical problems.In the opening scene Robert startles Catherine while she watches TV in the middle of the night. He gives her a bottle of champagne for her birthday, and they chat for a while about the nature of insanity, ending with the revelation that Robert died last week and his funeral is tomorrow.Awakened from this dream, Catherine realizes that Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal), a former graduate student of Robert's, is still upstairs, reading through Robert's books. Robert filled many notebooks with meaningless notes. Hal believes that Robert's genius may have withstood his illness, and clues to that genius might lie among the gibberish of his notebooks. When Hal comments on the vast amount of work Robert did, a suspicious Catherine searches Hal's backpack. Though Catherine finds nothing in Hal's bag, a notebook falls out of his coat. He explains that he wanted to give the notebook as a birthday present because it "had something written in it about her, not math, her". Hal is forced to leave, giving the notebook as intended, when Catherine calls the police.The next day, for the funeral, Catherine's sister Claire (Hope Davis) arrives in town. A huge contrast to the unkempt Catherine, Claire is an overly put together, neurotic New Yorker. Relations between the sisters are tense, and Catherine cannot stand her sister's constant harping on matters of appearance. Catherine is also upset that Claire didn't care for her father as much as Catherine did...