John Lopez, Producer, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2023, Sundance Institute, Comissioning Award

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Biopic

Length: 108 pages 

Field of Science: Mathematics & Logic

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

INCOMPLETENESS is an unconventional biopic about the life and work of Austrian logician KURT GÖDEL; how the love of his wife ADELE helped him flee the descent of Europe into fascism; and how his friendship with ALBERT EINSTEIN helped him battle his own mind’s self-destructive tendencies.

We OPEN on an old KURT GÖDEL in his kitchen, staring at a hard-boiled egg. He’s starving to death but refuses to eat. Finally, Gödel faints and lies helpless until a spaceship carrying a future version of himself comes to the rescue.

We FLASHBACK to a younger Gödel at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, where the highlight of his day is walking home with ALBERT EINSTEIN. Today, he has a birthday gift for Einstein: novel solutions to relativity’s field equations that prove time travel is possible. He gives them to an astounded Einstein, then turns to camera and introduces himself to the audience: he would like to tell us about his incompleteness theorems.

Gödel escorts us back to pre-war Vienna, when art, music, science, and philosophy were all undergoing radical transformations. Gödel was a young student in this heady world, and through a mixture of musical, animation, and other genres, he tells us how he fell in with the Vienna Circle, the famous group of mathematicians, scientists and philosophers who explored the foundations of reason in order to reform philosophy. Foremost among them was charismatic MORITZ SCHLICK who popularized the work of reclusive philosopher LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN. Gödel’s attracted to the group, but he thinks they are too enthralled with Wittgenstein, and their goal of ridding philosophy of all “metaphysics” might be missing something important. As he joins their ongoing debates in lecture halls and cafes across Vienna, Gödel also falls in love with a cabaret dancer, ADELE.

Gödel tells us how he ended up changing logic through his famous Incompleteness Theorems – and how no one paid any attention until Hungarian polymath JOHN VON NEUMANN realized what he’d done. (After Gödel explains it to both him and us via an elaborate dream sequence.) Despite Gödel’s shyness, Von Neumann spreads the word about his work and Gödel is invited to lecture at Princeton. There, he makes friends with Albert Einstein, finding in him a kindred spirit who feels his greatest accomplishments have been woefully misinterpreted.

As this happens, Austria succumbs to fascism, and Gödel ignores the dangers until it’s too late. Fortunately, Adele doesn’t, and she begs Gödel to emigrate. At first, Gödel refuses to yield to the forces of unreason. Besides, he’s obsessed by his new work on Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis (regarding the nature of infinity). However, after the Nazis take over Austria, he relents and, with Von Neumann’s help, secures a U.S. visa as World War 2 starts.

He and Adele flee across Siberia to Princeton where Gödel re-unites with Einstein. Safe in the United States, all seems well. However, Gödel’s inability to prove the Continuum Hypothesis and his growing obsession with the philosophy of Leibniz take a toll. As his mental health deteriorates. Gödel becomes convinced someone wants to poison him, and that he’s being followed by the FBI. Adele does her best to keep her husband stable, but it almost breaks their marriage. Einstein’s death triggers a mental collapse in Gödel, and Adele comes to his rescue once more.

We then flash forward twenty years and meet the author of the book Incompleteness, Rebecca Goldstein, as she tells us about her own interactions with Gödel. Adele’s love kept him together for twenty years until she underwent a lengthened hospital stay for surgery. Left alone, Gödel devolves rapidly, losing himself in a search for philosophical revelation, which brings us back to the opening. Staring into the egg reveals Gödel’s final fantasy: a confrontation with physicist Ludwig Boltzmann whose own philosophical investigations led him to suicide. In this confrontation, Gödel has his own revelation, and we cut to the writer of the screenplay, John Lopez. He gives us an epilogue about Gödel’s life and the Vienna Circle. We end with Adele at Gödel’s deathbed, who is paradoxically visited by the time-traveling Gödel from the opening.

He tells us Einstein misunderstood his relativity solutions. EITHER those solutions prove time travel is real OR they prove time itself is just an illusion we use to make sense of existence — with that the film spools out and we cut to WHITE.