Review

The Man Who Knew Infinity

G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) work on sophisticated mathematical postulates in The Man Who Knew Infinity.
G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) and Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) work on sophisticated mathematical postulates in The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Respectful and restrained, Matthew Brown's film about autodidactic Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan is the sort of tastefully polished affair you might imagine it to be. It's a formulaic Merchant-Ivory style soap opera that plays up the dramatic aspects of the subject's life while assuring us of his brilliance by having others marvel at theorems a mainstream audience couldn't be expected to understand.

Ramanujan (played by Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel, who bears little resemblance to the movie's somewhat chunky subject) was born in 1887, and despite having little aptitude or love for school was developing sophisticated trigonometric postulates by the time he was 13. The movie picks him up as a young man in 1913, living in poverty in Madras, lacking a college degree and unable to get the academic world to pay attention to his work.

The Man Who Knew Infinity

82 Cast: Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones, Devika Bhise

Director: Matthew Brown

Rating: PG-13, for some thematic elements and smoking

Running time: 108 minutes

In desperation he reaches out to British mathematician G.A. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) via India-based civil engineer Sir Francis Spring (Stephen Fry, who wrings a lot of juice from a three-minute cameo), a math fan who recognizes Ramanujan's potential and gives him a job. Hardy is initially suspicious of the brash Indian, but soon sends for Ramanujan, who leaves his new wife (Devika Bhise) to journey to a Cambridge filled with bigoted academics reluctant to take seriously the work of an undereducated subcontinental.

Initially Hardy insists that the gifted Ramanujan show his inspired work in conventional ways, but eventually he realizes that his prodigy is possessed of intellectual superpowers. And doomed.

All of this is accomplished in a handsome, terrifically conventional fashion designed to flatter whatever audience has wandered into the theater by suggesting they are watching an elevated drama about the life of the mind. However, the obligatory scene of Ramanujan racing across the quad with a sheaf of papers in hand, bursting with the need to tell his begrudging mentor of the breakthrough he's just made, wouldn't be out of place in a standard issue romantic comedy.

And the music, lighting and script all conspire to hagiographic effect. At one point, thanks to backlighting, Ramanujan even gets a halo.

All this said, The Man Who Knew Infinity is not a bad film, but one that plays everything very safe. Irons, as usual, is a treat to watch as the odd bird Hardy, a lifelong bachelor who once described his relationship with Ramanujan as the only "romantic incident" of his life. And Patel stretches a little beyond his normal range as the similarly closed-off Indian.

It should be noted that the film has received good reviews from the math community, which seems to rate it as a better movie about numbers than either A Beautiful Mind or The Imitation Game. This might be due to the involvement of Princeton mathematician Manjul Bhargava and Ramanujan specialist Ken Ono, who served as technical consultants.

MovieStyle on 07/01/2016

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