Proof:

I am pretty sure that I am the wrong person to neutrally review this movie for general consumption. I read the play almost as soon as it hit the bookstores. I saw it performed in Chicago with my father and in New York with my best friend and partner in mathematical travails. I loved the University of Chicago and sometimes loved math (my major) too. So I loved the movie, but what does that prove?

Gwenyth Paltrow is a perhaps-crazy perhaps-genius self-taught student of math. Anthony Hopkins is her clearly crazy clearly genius father, a well-loved mathematician formerly at the University of Chicago whose madness dominates her life. The rest is the story of their relationship, the title object, and a few ancillary satellites.

The New York Times, unshockingly, failed to get it:

Catherine . . . demands our pity, our attention, our indulgence, our love, while giving little in return but her narcissism. These demands wouldn't seem so egregious if Catherine wanted our love because she was lonely or understandably depressed. But we are not supposed to fall for this unpleasant creature because of her human qualities; we are meant to fall for her because she may be a genius and therefore not as human as we are.

(T)he movie is the most deeply University of Chicago I can imagine a movie being. Not the two-minute When Harry Met Sally opener, not the Indiana Jones fleeing from his office hours gag, but a complete movie both set in and filmed in the confines of the university and the neighborhood and capturing them both, visually and emotionally. They got it right. It's not a true story, but it's what that story would have been like.