There’s safety in numbers, but no real spark
|||THE MAN WHO KNEW INFINITY
DIRECTOR: Matthew Brown
CAST: Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Devika Bhise, Toby Jones, Stephen Fry, Jeremy Northam, Kevin R McNally, Richard Johnson, Anthony Calf, Padriac Delaney, Shazad Latif, Arundhati Nag
CLASSIFICATION: 10
RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Deborah Young
It’s hard to make numbers sexy, but the life of Indian mathematics genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (Patel) who revolutionised the field in the early 20th century, was an extraordinary story waiting to be told.
Hailing from a poor family in Madras, he arrived in Cambridge in 1914 and set the university on fire with his brilliant mind and startling mathematical formulas which, he said, were sent to him by God. If The Man Who Knew Infinity could share just a fraction of his visionary originality, it would be a far more engrossing film than the respectable, but all too conventional, biopic it is.
Engaging performances by Patel and Irons as his curmudgeonly mentor gradually warm up the Cambridge story, but the Indian part feels perfunctory and unconvincing.
Writer-director Brown seems at ease in the world of pre-war academia and all its brilliance, and prejudices. His admiration for Ramanujan is obvious, and you only wish the film had been injected with greater authenticity into recounting the story of his life, which burned so brightly and so briefly.
While The Theory of Everything, another film set in the world of Oxbridge academia, shifted the topic away from theoretical physics and concentrates on Stephen Hawking’s marriage, The Man Who Knew Infinity gropes for a personal angle. The hero’s long-distance marriage to a woman back in India remains in the background. His friendship with Cambridge don GW Hardy, who championed his brilliance against racism and prejudice, is the core of the film.
Ramanujan was born in a strictly observant Brahmin family, but was too poor to even live with his young bride Janaki (Bhise). Miracles are common in the story, the first is being hired as an accountant in a firm that recognises his unusual talent. With the help of his boss, he sends a letter to Hardy and receives one back inviting him to come to Trinity College, Cambridge, to work on his ideas. Leaving Janaki with his mother, he sails to England and settles into Cambridge.
He arrives in Cambridge with two thick notebooks full of original formulas that dazzle the learned profs. Where on earth, asks Hardy, do these formulas come from? The young man confesses that he receives them directly from God while he sleeps or prays. As an atheist, Hardy can’t believe him, but looks as intrigued as the viewer at this revelation.
Brown’s screenplay brings math into the dialogue often. String theory, prime numbers and continued fractions might not be the stuff blockbusters are made of, but they certainly turn on the math department. Simply put, it all seems to boil down to discovering original formulas and proving they are true. The self-taught Ramanujan has no problem coming up with the first, but proving what he intuitively knows is beyond his meagre education.
Patel well expresses Ramanujan’s nobility of soul; it would make him stand out from the other students even without his gift.
Irons also rises to the role. He portrays Hardy as a loyal and upright eccentric, whose defences break down before the plight of the unfortunate genius he has come to love. – The Hollywood Reporter
If you liked Proof or The Theory of Everything, you will like this.